Think of Ryppl as a distributed cross-platform software management system designed to accommodate both end-users and developers. Ryppl unites version control, test management, package management , release management, reporting, and other sub-systems into a coherent and scalable software management system.
Unlike a traditional package manager, which only delivers binaries and/or a source snapshot, when ryppl downloads a package, it can give you a clone of a Git repository, with that package's entire development history. If you're an ordinary end-user, the fact that it's a git repository may be invisible to you, but if you're a developer, it means you're already prepared to work on the package, keep track of your changes, and submit them to the official maintainer(s).
Ryppl includes facilities for building, testing, and installing packages on the local machine. However, it also has integrated support for remote testing. That is, you can arrange that tests be run on build slaves located “out there” on the internet. This allows developers to discover portability issues without having direct access to every build platform.
What we can do currently:
At the time of this writing, the code in Ryppl itself is just an extraordinarily thin layer over PIP and Distutils2… which is how we want things. The idea is to not end up with a system that requires much in the way of its own maintenance.
A huge effort was expended April-May 2010 to get pip to work properly on Windows and to be hookable with our functionality. Development went into a slight lull (to accommodate other work) in late June 2010, but Eric Niebler is actually moving his physical address to Cambridge, MA on July 1 to work side-by-side, and essentially full-time, with Dave Abrahams on ryppl. Expect a large burst of progress then.
Also, Kitware has committed a minimum of one full man-month over the period ending May 2011 to getting all necessary CMake (and CTest/CDash) support in place.
Most contributors are giving their time to this project for free. If you make a donation to Ryppl, it will be used to pay for the time of those who can't afford to be quite so generous. We need their help, and they need to pay the bills, so please consider making a donation. Thanks!
This documentation is written in reStructuredText and assembled by Sphinx. You can get the source from the doc/ subdirectory of the master branch of the git repository at git://github.com/ryppl/ryppl.git.
| [1] | Ryppl works on Windows and Posix systems. |
