increase apt flexibility (for third party apps)

[MadMan2k]

there is one thing where every package manager from apt to emerge fails, 
it is modular applications.
These mostly bring their own mini-package manager along, which is not 
compatible to the native one
or even worse interferes with it.

Two of these apps that I am using are, firefox and eclipse. The worst 
case described obove happens with firefox and the
flash-plugin, which is avaible through apt, but also as a xpi.
Since the last way is the more user friendly one, the flash plugin will 
most likely not show up in synaptic.

This could be solved if third party software could use apt as well, but 
this would require apt to support binary-patches to be a
alternative to the self-developed third party solutions. Otherwise it 
creates too much overhead.

Also apt would have to be able to handle with really large sources 
lists, because there should be a possibility for the developer to 
maintain his packages himself.

Another system for displaying the packages would be necessary as well, 
since the naming sheme firefox-* would not be clear any more if there 
were hundreds of plugins for firefox.
Therefore the system of displaying the packages as a tree, like it is 
already used to display the categories, should be extended. (i.e. deepen 
the tree)

My Point is: if we dont want to support autopackage or any other system 
which requires ABI-compatibility, we need to offer something else, since 
there *is* a need for decentralization and third party integration.

M2k