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Last week, Microsoft’s Open Source Developer Garett Serack announced The Common Opensource Application Publishing Platform.
CoApp is a package management system to install and maintain open source software on Windows.
“CoApp aims to create a vibrant Open Source ecosystem on Windows by providing the technologies needed to build a complete community-driven Package Management System,” Serack explained on the project site, “along with tools to enable developers to take advantage of features of the Windows platform.”
It’s an attempt to create for Windows a build system similar to autoconf used on Linux and other Unix operating systems.
“While Windows provides some pretty good stuff for packaging applications in the form of Windows Installer technology (aka “MSI”),” Serack said, “the down side is that the open source community hasn’t really picked it up.”
On Thursday, Microsoft’s CodePlex Foundation accepted the CoApp project and listed it in Systems Infrastructure and Integration Gallery.
“Interoperability across the open source and Windows worlds is a worthy problem for the CodePlex Foundation to tackle,” CodePlex Executive Director Paula Hunter said.
