Short version of the README (the most important piece of documentation as everybody knows :)

rpa-base is a port/package manager created to be the base for RPA’s client-side package management. You can think of it as RPA’s apt-get + dpkg. Some sexy features (see the link above for more) working now:

• sane dependency management: rpa-base installs dependencies as needed, keeps track of reverse dependencies on uninstall, and will remove no longer needed dependencies
• atomic (de)installs: operations on the local RPA installation are atomic transactions; the system has been designed to survive ruby crashes (OS crashes too on POSIX systems)
• handling C extensions: if you have the required C toolchain, rpa-base can compile extensions as needed
• rdoc integration: RDoc documentation for libraries is generated at install time (currently put in $prefix/share/doc/rpa0.0/portname)
• unit testing: when a library is installed, its unit tests are run; the installation is canceled if they don’t pass
• ri integration: ri data files are generated for all the libraries managed by RPA; you can access this information with ri-rpa

Releasing

I’ve been feeling it was ready for a preliminary release for a long time now (since around mid-March), but I’m notoriously bad at that and just kept hacking. Now that RPA is reported to work on win32, it’s definitely time for a tech-preview release.

I’m soon applying for Rubyforge’s services and working on a FAQ and some minimalistic documentation.