xpm is currently a personalized branch of fpm (Effing Package Management;), which greatly simplifies cross-distro package generation.

It creates or converts between

• Debian .deb
• RedHat .rpm
• Node .npm
• OSX .pkg
• Ruby .gem
• Solaris packages
• plain ZIPs or TARs

and lots more..
See the → Howto on common fpm usage examples.

xpm target/source extensions

This variant (precautiosly renamed for parallel installation) adds a few more modules:

• target exe for Windows SFX installers

• reader src to consume per-file relative pack: specifiers and meta fields from primarily source-based bundles

• target phar which bundles PHP scripts into .phar/zip/tars with meta fields

ToDo

It's further planned to support:

• Multi-target creation in one swoop.

  fpm -t deb,rpm,exe
  

  Not yet sure, but seems feasible. In particular since fpm package modules use non-overlapping specialty flags each.

• Introduce simple filters (semi-build scripts that resemble debian helpers, or quick tasks to reduce manual build scripts) to be run between sourcing and target build module.

  fpm --filter mangz,appdata
  

  Non-conclusive list. Not yet decided on --filter or --modify or --pipe or overloading -f, or adding a new short -i/-r/-u/-w flag or whatever's free.

Still pondering

And a slightly overambitious extension:

• a GUI-based cross-distro installer

  • Basically a zip, with shell prefix (derived from the existing sh target),
  • But the primary payload being a Python script (__init__.py),
  • Later Perl, Shell as optional fallback,
  • xdialog/xmessage/zenity in absence of Tk/gtk/qt bindings for either,
  • And one or multiple .debs included
  • DEBs are for all practical purposes the currently most widely supported format (Debian/Ubuntu/Mint family, OSX flint, OpenWRT ipkg, Windows wpkg.exe)
  • Still can be converted to native RPMs on target systems (using alien or an included slim fpm)
  • Else can easily be just extracted raw with ar|tar anyway).

See Research on existing and inactive cross-distro packagers, schemes and initiatives.

GitHub

I just don't fancy git. That's all. But this fossil repo will be synced back to https://github.com/prof-milki/xpm once in a while.

Name

Yes, I'm aware xpm is technically a taken moniker. Just sounded cool. (Though firefox has long abondened them, and Wayland will eradicate xpixmaps anyway... So xpm is just a historic format; moreover libxpm never provide a binary by that name anyway.)