Patent ID: 7222341

Claim:
In a computer, a method of processing one or more software dependencies, the method comprising: for one or more of the software dependencies, determining whether software associated with the software dependency is present on the computer; responsive to determining the software associated with the software dependency is not present on the computer, acquiring, by a software package manager running on the computer, the software associated with the software dependency; after acquiring the software associated with the software dependency, updating a database at the computer indicating the software associated with the software dependency is installed on the computer; wherein at least one of the software dependencies specifies a plurality of software items forming a software package, wherein the software package comprises a mixture of native code components and platform-independent code components; wherein at least one of the software dependencies refers to a list comprising one or more other software dependencies; and wherein the acquiring the software associated with the software dependency comprises recursively processing the one or more other software dependencies.