Edgy Third Party Package Management

[Jerry Haltom]

And this is basically all my spec bridges. It simply lets you deliver a
link to an apt repository of your own in a way that is easily
installable for users. They should be able to just click on an .apt file
from their browser and be walked through the addition of it to their
sources.list. Nothing more, nothing less.

It simply helps users.

On Mon, 2006-06-05 at 12:01 -0600, Brent Larsen wrote:
> 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.
> 
>