Announcement: One Click Installer

[Chris Warburton]

On Tue, 2007-08-07 at 02:22 +0100, Greg K Nicholson wrote:
> Drive-by href: http://autopackage.org/

I think Autopackage has the wrong idea. From a technical perspective
most package formats contain the same data, so converting between them
should be easy. The actual problem is the contents of the packages, the
data and metadata itself. A Debian package for Debian might not work in
Ubuntu so making another format isn't the point. Forgetting tricky
technical issues like compiler and library versions and focusing on the
metadata; there is no point depending on 'foo' if that functionality is
provided by 'bar' in another distro. This is the key area to
standardise, after that is done then tools like alien could improve
significantly and upstream packaging would be more feasable (and if
upstreams are packaging their own software then those would become the
standard across distros, hopefully creating a feedback loop to keep
things running smoothly). Of course I am not saying distros should not
do their own packaging, but if upstreams release files compatible with
the quality-assured distro files then those who don't rely on strict QA
are free to use whatever packages they find.

As a side note I think that the idea of a list of third party repos is
flawed. It doesn't solve us-and-them issues, it just creates an
us-and-these-and-them situation. The solution needs to be implementable
by anyone, decentralised, robust and generic.

Thanks,
Chris Warburton