Purp is an achronym for Pugo-RPM which is a tool for managing RPM-packages. Purp uses the ncurses-lib which means that it's textbased, and therefore can be used on most kinds of terminals. The previously only other RPM-handler (except for the rpm-command itself) Glint has to be used under X-windows, which therefore limits it's use, even if it's nice.

Purp is of course released under Gnu General Public Licence (GPL).

I have now started a rather big work, a total rewrite of Purp from scratch. The reason is that the old code is really bad. It's a mixup between C and C++ and it lacks of abstraction and design. The major reason for this is that I was rather new to UNIX programming when I started to code on Purp back in 1997. I also started the project as a C project but later began using C++ for the GUI since I like using object orientation when writing user interfaces. I also didn't know very much about the importance of abstraction and design back then.

This rewrite is now about one third finished. It will take some time, but it will be worth it! You can follow the work at the status page.

Since I don't have enough sparetime to do everything I'd like to do with Purp I now look for persons that would like to help! I'm sure that Purp can be much better, users have sent me many nice suggestions and ideas which could make Purp a very nice tool.

If you are interested in taking part of the development then please mail me at pugo@lysator.liu.se.

I will set up a maillist and a CVS-tree for developers as soon as I get some response from interested developers.

RPM is a common format for distributing, installing and managing software on UNIX-systems. RPM is developed by Red Hat Software Inc, and was created for their Linux-distribution "Red Hat". Now it has spread to a wide area of platforms, for example Linux, IRIX, Solaris, SunOS, AIX, HP/UX, AmigaOS, and FreeBSD