This month i would like to point at the latest developments on the OSCAR core: * OSCAR Repository Manager, a.k.a. ORM, has appeared. ORM is a simple abstraction on top of PackMan that allows one to easily deal with a given Linux distribution: when creating a new ORM object, one can specify the Linux distribution the object is associated with, and then ORM knows which OSCAR repositories must be used, how to bootstrap an image, and how to manage binary packages. This abstraction is usefull to simplify some OSCAR related code. For instance, SystemInstaller can now be modified to rely on ORM for image creation, avoiding the current implementation based on several modules, specific to SystemInstaller, and duplicating capabilities already provided by others OSCAR components. For more details about ORM, please refer to ‘‘perldoc OSCAR::RepositoryManager’’ after the installation of ORM on your system. * Audit of the Selector code: thanks to the effort of OSCAR developers, we have now a specification of Selector’s capabilities. This audit allowed us to identify implementation limitations and to address those
limitations. Thanks to these modifications, Selector is now much faster and is actually based on a clear and well-specified interface with ODA, the OSCAR database (Selector get/set data from/into ODA). For more details, refer to the Selector documentation, which is available with the Selector code, under to ‘‘doc’’ directory. * Separation of the code of the different OSCAR core components: the source code of ODA, Selector, and ORM are now separated from the source code of OSCAR trunk. This source code for those components is now in ‘‘pkgsrc’’ (http://svn.oscar.openclustergroup.org/trac/oscar/browser/pkgsrc). This organization of the source code allows us to have a fine grain management of the different developments: each components can have its own release cycle and dependencies between components can easily be expressed via binary packages dependencies (especially since, nowadays, OSCAR is entirely shipped via binary packages).