Edgy Third Party Package Management

[Brent Larsen]

In my "other" life, where I work for a living, we are looking to port 
our windows time clock software over to Linux.  Essentially making us an 
ISV. We made the decision to port it to Ubuntu dapper, and we planned on 
prebuilding dapper pc's with a sources.list that includes our site's 
repo for our software.  Then we assumed that we would pick up all the 
support for those PCs, and wouldn't even give them root (or sudo) accounts.

folks that wanted to install their own system would have a howto for 
adding our repo and doing the initial install, and they would agree that 
their "Ubuntu" apps were their problem, and the apps from our repo are 
our problem.  we address the "who's problem is it" by accepting all the 
responsibility for customers who yield root to us, and little or no 
responsibility for those who install themselves--they are expected to be 
competent.

as far as supporting other distros, we just wont.  if a particular 
customer wants to use it on their red hat, they will have to pay us to 
port / test / build rpms.   but we think that most of the people who use 
our app on Linux will be coming from windows and they aren't locked into 
a distro, so we can enforce our preference on them, and they would 
prefer it anyway.

in my opinion, there in no need for third party installers.

isv's need to be responsible for setting up a mini-repo, not just making 
a deb file designed for a particular Ubuntu phase.

A lot of ISVs would jump on an option to use apt-get to pull packages 
from their ftp repo that requires apt to be smart enough to login with a 
username and password, so that they could keep track of which customers 
are updated and make sure that their stuff isn't available to anyone and 
everyone.  I think this sort of feature is more valuable than allowing 
third party packages to be installed easily.

Ubuntu has a lot of momentum.  let other organizations join in with some 
commitment to the community (like working repos for their software) and 
I think that they will.  I know the company I work for is going to.