Deb Installer for Dapper.

[Josué Alcalde González]

El sáb, 15-10-2005 a las 22:36 +0200, Michael Vogt escribió:

> 

> I like this idea, but what do you think about going one step further?
> My idea would be to inspect the deb file and extract the control
> information and parse the Depends/PreDepends/Conflicts line. Now use
> libapt to figure if these dependencies can be satified and if so,
> install them. Then dpkg -i is called. This way it will never produce a
> broken cache but still make install local debs easy and painless (with
> information how many additonal packages needs to be installed). And no
> need to modify apt/synaptic/sources.list.

This is a better solution, but more difficult to develop. It was too
much work for me.

But, if you are doing the hard job, you could develop a new
"libapt-deb". Then, it could be use to develop gdebi, a command-line
program to replace dpkg -i, and even add a new feature to Synaptic.
This would be great.

If libapt isn't thought to install local packages, perhaps it is not a
good idea to try to integrate it.

Anyway, I am talking too much. I don't know nothing about libapt. I have
only used it to get some information about packages. I don't know how it
works to install packages or solve dependencies.


> 
> To test if that works I hacked a prototype in python-apt/python-gtk
> that will examine the deb file and check if it can satisfy the
> dependencies. If so, it will tell how many additonal dependencies
> needs to be installed first. It requires small modifications in
> python-apt and vte (to have a nice progress bar when installing the
> packages). The prototype is at
> http://people.ubuntu.com/~mvo/bzr/gdebi--main/ (as a bzr archive).
> 
> I put some screenshots of the prototype at:
> http://people.ubuntu.com/~mvo/gdebi-1.png
> http://people.ubuntu.com/~mvo/gdebi-2.png
> http://people.ubuntu.com/~mvo/gdebi-3.png
> 
> I wonder if it might even be feasible to add some additonal safety
> checks like testing if the deb contains files already on disk and
> warn about that.
> 


What do you think about using two programs? 
deb-viewer as a user program, and deb-installer as a root program.
I think it would be better and easy to maintain, but it also has some
problems:
- Duplicate the work: get the properties of the package in both, viewer
and installer.

Anyway, I am near to complete a deb-viewer developed in C++ (I must
learn python). 
It will be easy to understand for you, since the code is based on
synaptic code.
I will send you the code this week or perhaps, upload it to cvs.


-- 
Josué Alcalde González <josuealcalde at gmail.com>