What is http://packages.magento.com/?

Question

On various social medias I've seen the URL http://packages.magento.com/ bandied about. This appears to be a composer repository (using satis software to host the repository).

What's not clear is

1. Who runs the repository (i.e. eBay? A third party? A third party acting with eBay's blessing?)

2. How a user can (if at all) get a package listed in this repository

3. If this is for Magento 1 packages, Magento 2 packages, or both

4. If this is for Magento 1 packages, how the composer project should be setup to install the packages into Magento 1 (as Magento 1's module system isn't fully compatible with the defacto vendor/* standard)

Does anyone here have any information on the above?

Answer 1

Quoted from https://alankent.wordpress.com/2014/08/02/magento-2-progress-towards-installation-via-composer/:

What is packages.magento.com? This is a Satis repository of the Magento 2 packages. This might change around by final release, but it gets the packages out there for now without polluting packagist.org with our weekly alpha code drops. Note that the root package listing all the modules that make up community edition is currently on packagist.org at https://packagist.org/packages/magento/product-community-edition. We are still experimenting with where best to host everything.

Answer 2

1. eBay/Magento runs them (who else would get access to the magento domain?)

2. You cant, and probably never will because of security and stability reasons.

3. No, this is not for Magento1 and does not have a single magento1 package and probably never will have one because there is no stable workflow for magento1.

4. currently, even magento2 is not compatible to have modules in vendor/*

Answer 3

My understanding is that Magento is really looking to leverage composer and packages heavily in Magento 2. Alan Kent, an eBay/Magento employee (but to be clear, his blog is a personal blog, so this isn't official eBay/Magento documentation), has talked a lot about Magento 2 and Composer on his blog - i.e.: http://alankent.wordpress.com/2014/07/12/magento-2-product-and-composer-version-numbering/

Looking over packages.magento.com, all of those packages are Magento 2-related, and checking the ownership of the IP that's hosting packages.magento.com, it's owned by eBay: http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=network&host=packages.magento.com

This seems to be for 'official' Magento 2 packages only thus far. It looks like Magento is moving towards a setup where you can fully install Magento 2 via Composer: http://alankent.wordpress.com/2014/08/02/magento-2-progress-towards-installation-via-composer/

Edit: Ahh, we have an answer from Alan Kent on Twitter: https://twitter.com/akent99/status/528995886689300480 - "It is an experiment shipping composer packages for each weekly push."