Announcement: One Click Installer - What I need as a third party APT repository maintainer

[Scott Ritchie]

On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 19:01 +0200, Krzysztof Lichota wrote: 
> So, here is my shot at solving this problem - One Click Installer
> (http://code.google.com/p/one-click-installer/).
> 
> The idea is similar to this implemented in
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ThirdPartyApt, but with broader scope
> (supporting all distributions, not only Debian-based) and more features.
> 

On Wed, 2007-08-08 at 14:07 -0500, Jerome Haltom wrote:
> I agree with all of this. Except that I think what MS does is "just
> fine.", and I've love to provide that ability for Ubuntu, and Ubuntu
> alone. And so I will. Hence why I wrote wiki.ubuntu.com/ThirdPartyApt,
> and am just now getting motivated to finish it (after this
> conversation.)

Right now, approximately 70 thousand people use the Winehq APT
repository to keep an updated Wine package.  Every one of them had to
follow the instructions here: http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb

Simply put, these instructions suck.  Google has GUI instructions for
their repository, and those also suck:
http://www.google.com/linuxrepositories/apt.html

Both are as simple as we can make them, and they are inordinately
frightening to new users.  Pasting arcane shell commands as root into a
terminal is not easy to use; neither is the 7 step graphical process
Google gives.

This is not fixable by the apt:// protocol, as that is (properly) not
designed to encompass adding a new repository but instead install
software from existing repositories.

I, as an upstream ISV with my own third party repository, need it to be
easy for the user to use my software.  It should be so easy that I don't
even need to give instructions - just a link to a single file that they
can double click on.

A user should be able to download a standard repository file, double
click it, be informed about what packages and repository it's going to
install, enter their password, and then be done.  

>From what I can tell, this is going to be handled exactly by Third Party
Apt, and I hope it can be finished in time for Gutsy.

Will One Click Installer also do this, perhaps embedding the internals
of Third Party Apt on Ubuntu systems?

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie