COBOL is mostly dead. However, there was a time when it was alive and well, and due to this there is a plethora of libraries available for it. Necropolis (a city of the dead) is a package manager to help with the installation and management of COBOL libraries.
The two primary functions of Necropolis are:
- Installing packages into new projects
- Providing a way to get all the necessary packages for a given project.
To install a new package into a given project, run $ necro -install <package_name>. $ necro install will create a osiris file if it does not already exist.
To install the dependencies for an existing project, run $ necro -revive. This will download all of the dependencies listed in the osiris file.
After a project has been setup, use $ necro build to build the COBOL project.
Osiris is the file used to list the dependencies for a project. An example osiris file is as follows:
COBWEB
cobcurses
The above Osiris file would install COBWEB (a web framework) and cobcurses (a curses library for COBOL).
Each Necropolis project should have an Osiris file (osiris).
Each package is enclosed in a *.tomb file. This simply appends to the end of the file, it does not replace any contents or change the headers.
This means that using Necropolis is not necessarily safe. There might be binary packages with malicious content. However, this is no different from any other binary package manager without a vetting process. If someone actually decides to file a malcious package for some reason, place an issue with the title of the package and it will be removed if it is found to be malicious.