Please test direct .deb installing

[Ramon Acedo]

Hi,
El mar, 15-11-2005 a las 12:00 +0100, Michael Vogt escribió:
> Hi,
> 
> making it possible to install .deb packages directly with dependency
> resolution is a feature request that we have for quite some
> time. There is a new tool available with the working title "gdebi"
> that should be able to do that: http://people.ubuntu.com/~mvo/gdebi/

This is a great idea, it's still difficult to teach newbies to go to
the terminal and type "dpkg -i foo.deb", they will find problems like
the path, the file name, etc. 

I'd like to go even further and propose that gdebi would allow to
install a package in the home of the user running it, without root
privileges, I think that autopackage (autopackage.org) already does
this.

For this to work gdebi should do:

* Keep track of what packages the user has installed in order to be
  able to remove them later (and ideally its dependencies).

* Extract the package in the user's home directory (something like 
 'dpkg -x foo.deb ~/')

* Set the user's path at least to $PATH:~/usr/bin:~/bin

Another idea would be that gdebi would permit install a .rpm converting
it first to .deb with alien.

And a difficult and crazy idea would be that gdebi would even try to
install a source package, kompile
(http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=30223) already does
this and checkinstall
(http://packages.ubuntu.com/hoary/admin/checkinstall) has another
interesting approach.

Anyway, what gdebi wants to do is already very useful and I look 
forward to see it in Dapper.

Ramon

Ramon