Where impact got going

Abstract

This paper discusses the impact package manager. The primary goal of this project is to support the development of a healthy eco-system around Modelica. For many other languages, the existence of an easy to use package manager has made it easier for people to explore and adopt those languages. We seek to bring that same kind of capability to the Modelica community by incorporating useful features from other package managers like bower, npm, etc. This paper is an update on the status of the impact package manager which was discussed previously in (Tiller and Winkler 2014). This latest version of impact involves a complete rewrite that incorporates a more advanced dependency resolution algorithm. That dependency resolution will be discussed in depth along with many of the subtle issues that arose during the development of this latest version of impact. Along with a superior dependency resolution scheme, the new version of impact is much easier to install and use. Furthermore, it includes many useful new features as well.