Pacloud: Towards a Universal Cloud-based Linux Package Manager

Abstract: Package managers are a very important part of Linux distributions but we have noticed two weaknesses in them: They use pre-built packages that are not optimised for specific hardware and often they are too heavy for a specific need, or packagesmay require plenty of time and resources to be compiled. In this paper, we present a novel Linux package manager which uses cloud computing features to compile and distribute Linux packages without impacting the end user's performance. We also show how Portage, Gentoo's package manager can be optimised for customisation and performance, along with the cloud computing features to compile Linux packages more efficiently. All of this resulting in a new cloud-based Linux package manager that is built for better computing performance.