Edgy Third Party Package Management

[Matt Zimmerman]

I'd like to summarize where things stand on this subject post-Dapper.
Today, we have the following vehicles for third parties who wish to provide
their software in an Ubuntu-friendly form:

- Interact with a registered Ubuntu developer who will package and upload
  their software to the official archive

- Interact with a registered Ubuntu developer who will review packages
  prepared by the vendor, and upload them to the official archive

- Provide packages in a third-party repository which can be registered with
  app-install-data and conveniently accessed within Add/Remove, where
  an EULA can be displayed prior to installation

The primary piece which is missing is the glue from the browser to the last
item above, to allow vendors to publish useful links to their repository on
their website.  Users following such links would be sent directly to
gnome-app-install, where the usual workflow of enabling the repository and
installing packages should be used.

The implementation in g-a-i seems to use multiple files to hold all of the
data about a repository, but it should be straightforward to extend to
handle a single file, which I think would satisfy your use case along with
the above glue.

Thoughts?

-- 
 - mdz