App installer design: click packages

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 08:30:16PM +0400, Alex M wrote:
> 1) Which libraries you will consider as BASE system?
> 
> I hope not just "Ubuntu default installation" will treated as base system
> in purposes of distributive- and OS- independence... This set of libraries
> and it's versions will change in time, new libraries will require some
> system calls which is not available in older kernel versions.

At present, the target is the Ubuntu SDK, although this will be explicit
in the packages which rely on it ("Click-Framework: ubuntu-sdk-13.10"
etc.).

> Also if this library set is quite small, could they be placed in every
> package?

They will not be small. :-)

> 2) Do you plan to use components in packages?
> 
> Some details required about this question. Let's assume we want to pack Qt
> SDK with your brand new packaging manager. It will consist of Qt Creator,
> Qt library itself, documentation and sources. And of course, it would be
> convenient to include GCC or some different compiler it same package.
> 
> But we want set of packages without unconvenient dependencies...

This just seems to be a complex enough case that it's simply not a good
target for this packaging system.  I'm OK with that.  As I said, this is
not trying to be a complete replacement for debs, because if it tried to
do that it would rapidly turn into a second system with a different set
of flaws.

> I hope to see restore functionality (if we want to reset package to
> defaults and restore missing files).

The unpacked package directory will not be writable by the ordinary user
or the application directly, and should therefore not change.  As such,
I don't think a restore feature should be necessary.

> 3) Will directory with contents of package include it's version?

Yes.  There'll be a symlink to the current version for convenience.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]