Re: How about creating addons.gnome.org

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le dimanche 08 août 2010 à 15:07 +0200, Tomeu Vizoso a écrit :
> Implementation wasn't really long nor complex, but you need to decide
> if you really want to replace distributions as the means to distribute
> your software.
It would be great to find a way to integrate with distributions package
management systems. Add-ons installed on a per-user basis (as Mozilla
add-ons) are very annoying because they get updated when you're running
the app instead of when running system updates, and they become very
messy when you upgrade your whole distribution.

Having one package for every add-on is not practical for distributions,
but maybe addons.gnome.org could be a platform allowing distributions to
collect series of plugins for one app and bundle them into a single
package. It's usually very cheap to install a handful of scripts, even
if you only want one of them. So, approved add-ons for a given
application could automatically be committed to a module that would be
packaged by downstream ("gedit-plugins", "totem-plugins").

This way, updates can go through the standard process (updates,
backports...). OTC, I fear that the extension of the add-ons concept
will break the nice package management model by creating more and more
breaches into it. There's no reason why add-ons shouldn't be handled the
same way as other software.


Another solution would be to extend package management systems to be
more flexible WRT small software pieces like add-ons, e.g. by creating
packages on-the-fly or something, but that's another story.


Regards