90% of users and admins prefer to install packages rather than tar files or content from a [D]VCS. But packages don't necessarily follow the development stream of projects, to package alpha, beta. Giving the possibility for projects to distribute seamlessly packages for whatever step of their development is clearly a gain for the whole community.

The various aspects covered by the tool are:
* only produce software packages (ease integration in deployment severs, provide inheritance mecanisms, and Virtual Machines (VM) or Environments (VE))
* ease the various steps of solution life cycle (controlled ipact of installation/uninstallation, dependencies management, identical deliveries up to the customer, announce management, web site delivery, metadata management)
* help new projects in the provisioning of packages (templates and skeletons for the various supported OS, generated structure, help in VM/VE build)
* Avoid code or metadata duplication, as well as has no impact on the original project (macro system, separate repository)
* Neutral in term of Unix environment (repository, system, package type  agnostic)

These features help reducing the development cost by providing a process, method and tools to realize continuous packaging during the whole project life cycle.
Today the tool supports:
* Multiple repository (none - aka tar balls, SVN, CVS, Git, Mercurial, SVK...)
* Multiple systems ((RPM Linux - Red Hat, openSUSE, Mandriva, ..., deb Linux - Debian, Ubuntu, ..., ebuild - Gentoo, pkg Solaris/OpenSolaris, ...)
* Multiple build environments (local, VM - QEMU, KVM, ..., VE - mock, rinse, pbuilder, ...)
* Multiple repository manager (yum, urpmi, apt, ...)
and this at various phasis (development, test, integration, delivery)

It aims at becoming a tools for the vcs-pkg.org initiative
It's today used for projects as diverse as FOSSology, MondoRescue, LinuxCOE, GOsa², itself, ...

The presentation will describe the needs of the various people around a FLOSS project (user, admin, developer, packager), how packaging is a must have in the project, why package early, package often is the right mantra, and how Project-Builder.org can help them all achieve those goals.