Software suite
A software package, software system, software package or a software suite called the set of ( logical) related files and computer programs.
Depending on the operating system, there are various methods of software management. The programs and processes for the creation and use of program packages called package management.
Content of a software package
A software package can only contain the executable programs, other programs and special files contain, for example, interpretable programs, scripts, image files, audio files, application-specific example files and translations, documentation and source code. Often accompanying meta information about the author, the license, the development progress and the version are included. Hence the term software suite, on the French ( French suite, consequential, chaining, monitoring ') from the Latin ( Latin sequi, follow ').
Depending on the package are directly responsible for the integration with the operating system more files. In addition to installation and uninstallation routines may be even that also modifications to the operating system.
Design and Structure
The simplest program packages are simple archives, whose contents can be extracted to any location. This is true for example for source packages on systems such as Linux and BSD. You have file extensions such as. Tar.gz, . Tar.bz2. Tgz ( tarball ) or. Zip.
The same format, but with additional information for the installation, use of source -based Linux distributions and BSD derivatives. Since the software has yet to be compiled before the installation, information is included about which is already installed other software needs and where the package itself is installed.
More complex formats are the file types. Deb and. Rpm is, the software for the Linux distributions Debian and Red Hat included ( and each of its offshoots and compatible distributions).
If there is no central tool is ready to manage the software, each program package is responsible for its own installation. For this purpose, so installers are used, as they are common in Microsoft Windows and Apple's Mac OS X. However, these operating systems provide a program library with installation-related functions that use the most setup programs.
Difficulties and Solutions
Since the installation via Internet protocols is becoming more widespread, today's software packages are equipped with safety features. This concerns on the one hand to check for physical integrity checksum means, on the other hand, a cryptographic security using digital signature of the software author or distributor.
Since some packages depend on others, is to dissolve these dependencies, one of the most fundamental problems. With the help of virtual packages, the splitting of large packets into several smaller and a consistent assignment of version numbers the user remains the nowadays largely concealed.