The RISC OS Packaging Project was created to provide a packaging system for RISC OS, that worked well with RISC OS. The original site for the project is no longer available, but Packaging lives on with the main list of packages provided by RISC OS Open. Other authors have created their own lists. To access theses lists and try it out use PackMan.
For current details on packaging see the RISC OS Packaging Guide at RISC OS Open.
The rest of this page is an edited version of the original page for the Project, removing the parts that are no longer relevant and updating for the current state of packaging on RISC OS.
The following is an edited version of the home page of the RISC OS Packaging Project. The aims of the project are:
to build and distribute a collection of RISC OS software packages;
to provide a convenient mechanism for users to install, update and remove packages on their computers
to promote consistency and peaceful co-existence among packages in the collection by setting policies to regulate their content and behaviour;
to provide a systematic mechanism for recording, characterising and fixing bugs in the package collection;
to ensure that the legal status of all software in the package collection is understood and respected; and
to promote the development of free and open source software for RISC OS.
Please note that at present these are just aims. There are several ways to contribute:
by maintaining a package or packages;
by writing documentation;
by creating icons and other artwork;
by checking copyright and licences;
by reporting bugs.
Package maintainers do not generally need to be programmers, although familiarity with obey files and the structure of an application directory is quite important. The workload for any single package is unlikely to be onerous.
It is not my intention to usurp the role of active upstream authors, nor to burden them with additional work (except perhaps more bug reports). I hope that a friendly dialogue can be established in most cases. Licence terms may sometimes be questioned but will always be respected.
Packages are downloaded and installed using PackMan, for more details on it and how to downloaded and install it see here.
Requirements for packages to become part of the central package collection are specified in the Policy Manual.
RISC OS Open now maintain more modern package lists which should be seen as replacements to the the package lists hosted here. The RISC OS Open lists include the majority of the packages hosted here. Consider using these lists for adding new packages. For details of packaging via RISC OS Open see here.