Re: promoting good gnome apps via news.gnome.org

[Andreas Nilsson <nisses mail home se>]

On 06/16/2009 11:46 AM, Dave Neary wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Stormy Peters wrote:
> > I think we need an installer - for Linux and for Windows.
> >
> > And I think there's interest from several distributions to have an 
> > application install solution so if we were willing to create one (or 
> > a plan for one), I think we might be able to find resources to put 
> > behind it.
>
> I am against any Linux ISD (including ourselves) trying to provide a 
> one-size-fits-all installer, until a packaging system that allows that 
> comes along. I have high hopes for PackageKit, but in the meantime, 
> your goal should not be to give people installers, but to document 
> installing it on the most popular distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, Red 
> Hat, Fedora, SuSe) with generic "apt-get" or "yum" instructions. Each 
> distribution has a distribution specific installer, that is what we 
> should be targeting.

In some cases, you can even include just a link that people can click.
You can install, say, Transmission in Ubuntu from the browser using a 
link pointing to "apt:transmission", and in OpenSUSE you can use the one 
click installer-thing 
"http://software.opensuse.org/ymp/openSUSE:11.1/standard/transmission.ymp";.
The closest thing I could find for Fedora is outlined in a blog post 
from Hugsie [1], but that requires a mozilla plugin apparently.

Can any kind of browser detection thing figure out the distro you're 
running?

1. http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2008/09/09/packagekit-web-plugin/
- Andreas