Welcome to ComPact, the tool for Comprehensive Package Management by Elego. ComPact is aimed at developers and companies carrying out software production in-the-large. It offers integrated support of a wide range of technical management tasks involved in that, being based on a simple yet powerful concept of software package. The ensuing automation virtually frees its users from a great deal of these activities.
Software production on an industrial scale requires its practioners to deal with a multitude of technical management tasks. For example, one may have to document the dependencies of software libraries on each other, keep track of their development history, and/or support different hardware and compiler platforms. An important issue pertaining to that is whether it is done in a consistent way: "Are you sure that each component of your software system imports the same version of our indigenous general-purpose library?" has the potential for being a troublesome question whenever a project is large and has had a long duration.
All of that often requires continuous attention, and may even be intertwined with actual implementation work. People might, therefore, have difficulties recognizing it as its own kind of activity. Yet, there can be no question that it exists and, above all, entails costs. ComPact, the comprehensive solution to technical software management, allows its users to reduce these expenses. To this end, the crucial, though simple, initial step consists of introducing software packages to group together related modules, documentation, and data. This basis allows ComPact to automate tasks from the following areas:
Build management, that is, controlling compilation, linkage, and archives creation. The present version supports source code written in C/C++.
Target/platform configuration management, that is, controlling how software is built in different hardware and/or compiler environments.
Version management, that is, controlling the development history of software.