Edgy Third Party Package Management

[Jerry Haltom]

gnome-app-install is sort of a different path from what I was intending
to take with ThirdPartyApt. Dispute coming at it from totally different
angles, they mostly overlap.

The idea of adding things installed through ThirdPartyApt to
gnome-app-install automatically is appealing, but I believe slightly
separated from the actual goal of ThirdPartyApt, which is to move the
actual initiation of the distribution of the program to the
distributions web site (where, arguably, I believe it belongs), vs an
Ubuntu-centric management application.

Not to say the core code for each don't overlap massively.

It is also a consideration of mine for there to be a strict defined file
format standard to drive this out. There is interest for example on
making it easy for distributions to distribute software in this fashion
for other distributions (Nokia 770 comes to mind).

Anyways... for this to be done, somebody just needs to decide on
the .apt file format and write a better handler than I have. It's still
a plan of mine to continue work on it, but like most things, I just
don't have time.

I do have a lot of ideas about an interface for this .apt file handler
though.



Day dreaming:



The .apt file says to install "photoshop". The handler adds the
repository, updates. A dialog box comes up which allows the user to
customize what exactly is installed. "photoshop" Recommends
"photoshop-brushes" and "photoshop-samples". It Suggests
"photoshop-extensions".

|X| Photoshop
|X| Extra brushes
|X| Sample files
| | Third party extensions


^ Like Windows/OS X installer dialogs. Driven out by the Recommends and
Suggests lines of a particular package. Interesting. ;)


On Wed, 2006-06-28 at 10:19 -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote: 
> On Wed, Jun 28, 2006 at 07:04:06PM +0200, Sebastian Heinlein wrote:
> > Some time ago Jerry Haltom wrote a spec about this:
> > 
> > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ThirdPartyApt
> 
> It was his announcement of this writeup that I replied to.
> 
> -- 
>  - mdz
>