AgentFactory

The Agent Factory framework has recently been divided into a number of sub-packages. While this gives far more control over the components each user wishes to install (rather than the previous ``all-or-nothing" approach), it does mean that management these individual packages will become an issue.

While it is possible that a cross-platform, Agent Factory-specific package manager may be introduced in the future (and I wouldn't be holding my breath), for the moment I'll be maintaining Debian packages of the individual Agent Factory components. This will mean that any new versions can be installed by means of a typical ``apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" routine, so users won't have to be on the lookout for new versions of each individual package all the time.

These packages should be suitable for any Debian derivative (Ubuntu, MEPIS, Xandros, etc.) but any testing that goes on is limited to Ubuntu and Debian itself. Bugs should be reported to the Agent Factory Sourceforge site.

Access to the repository can be gained by adding the following line into your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://www.agentfactory.com/debian current main

After adding that, you'll have to grab the archive signing key for increased security. This can be done by running the following (as root):

# wget http://www.agentfactory.com/agentfactory-archive-key.gpg
# apt-key add agentfactory-archive-key.gpg

After this, running an ``apt-get update'' will make the Agent Factory packages available for installation.

Currently, the available packages are:

agentfactory

Agent Factory Runtime - needed by all other packages

agentfactory-mts-local

Local Message Transport Service plugin

agentfactory-mts-http

HTTP Message Transport Service plugin

agentfactory-mts-udp

UDP Message Transport Service plugin

agentfactory-fipa

FIPA agent plugin

agentfactory-afapl2

The AFAPL2 Developers Kit

At present, all of these packages will cause the appropriate plugin to be installed globally (i.e. in the /usr/lib/agentfactory/lib directory), and so they will be usable by all Agent Factory programs on your machine.