handling extensions in a canonical (no pun intended)

[Remco]

On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 4:00 AM, Dmitrijs
Ledkovs<dmitrij.ledkov at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/6/13 Remco <remco47 at gmail.com>:
>>
>> Well that's why I proposed to use PackageKit to announce these
>> extensions to Synaptic. That's essentially a way to automatically
>> generate packages.
>
> Are you suggesting a XPI/Mozilla-extensions backend for PackageKit?
> Well it will be usable from PackageKit but again dpkg will have no
> clue about those files and where they come from. And this starts to
> diverge system to a hybrid beast.

While that's somewhat true, this is already the case. In the current
situation, you have many separate programs with an extension mechanism
(Mozilla products, Eclipse, for example). These all operate
independently from each other and from dpkg. The reason this doesn't
completely mess up your system, is because all these extensions only
have effect on the one application, and only have dependencies from
their own extension mechanism.

So, from a technical point of view, there is no problem with the
current situation.

But there *is* a problem from an administration point of view. There
is no one tool that lists all extensions for all programs alongside
those programs. This problem is solved if all those mechanisms would
use PackageKit (and Synaptic would list those packages).

It may not be the most beautiful solution. (That would be if every
distro, every ISV, and that other company would use dpkg.) But I think
it's the most practical solution. After the initial burden of making
every program with extensions support PackageKit, there would be no
extra workload for packagers.

Remco