package manager tool?

[jshimoda9323]

So far the zopen tool has been great for developers to work on porting OSS tools. We will soon need a command/tool for installing and managing (upgrading?) these OSS tools and their version numbers, similar to other platforms' package management tools. Any ideas here?

One idea is to have commands that allows for searching, listing local installations, and installing packages. Example:

zopen list # List the locally installed packages
zopen search git # Search the list of available packages
zopen install git # Install the specified package
zopen purge git # Uninstall the specified package

Ideally, zopen would be both open sourced but also shipped with z/OS Unix so user's don't have to first install zopen on a fresh system, if that is possible.

[IgorTodorovskiIBM]

We could expand on zopen download to include these features. Right now zopen download downloads the latest release and unpax's the contents. Perhaps a better name for it is zopen install.

I like the idea of making it available in the OS or provided a minimal effort way to obtain it.

Some other ideas that have been considered include creating OCI images out of the open source binaries and publishing them to an open registry. So once podman becomes available on z/OS, we can then leverage it to install the open source images.