ANNOUNCE: rcd 2.0, rug 2.0, red-carpet 2.2, open-carpet 0.1

[Joe Shaw <joe ximian com>]

Hi,

Trow and I talked incessantly about it over Guinness at GUADEC, and it's
finally ready for human consumption: rcd 2.0, rug 2.0, red-carpet 2.2,
and open-carpet 0.1 are now available.

ABOUT THIS SOFTWARE
===================
(or, What is this thing you call love?)

The Red Carpet Daemon (rcd) is a system daemon which provides users
access to the underlying packaging database.  Through an XML-RPC
interface, clients can view the database, and with sufficient
permissions install, remove, and upgrade packages.  The daemon also
provides a very powerful dependency resolver which removes the headaches
of software management.

Rug is the command-line client interface to rcd.  With it you can browse
software through channels, install and remove packages, and get package
information.  It also includes "power features" like package history,
locks for preventing certain updates, and package rollback.

Red Carpet is a GTK-based graphical client which uses the daemon to
provide a friendly interface for managing software.

Open Carpet is a set of tools to create package metadata so that anyone
with a web page and some packages can set up a Red Carpet service.

MULTIPLE SERVICE SUPPORT
========================
(or, It's a big world out there.)

These new versions of rcd, rug, and red-carpet allow you to now use any
number of Red Carpet services, including ones set up by third-parties
using the Open Carpet tools.  This opens up the Red Carpet system to a
very large body of software provided by the open source community that
isn't shipped with Ximian products or your standard Linux distribution.

In rug, you can add new services by using the "rug service-add" command
like so:

	rug service-add http://open-carpet.org

In Red Carpet, you can add services by going to Edit -> Services.

OPEN CARPET SERVICE
===================
(or, Can I install perl-Device-Regulator-Plasmatronic?)

To illustrate the convenience and power of the new multiple service
support, there is a Red Carpet service at http://open-carpet.org which
makes available to rcd users a large number of existing Apt RPM
repositories, including FreshRPMS, the Fedora Project, NewRPMS, Dag
Wieers' Apt RPM repository, GStreamer, ATrpms, ExtRPMs, Jpackage, and
RPMPAN.

If you know of an Apt repository not listed there, or run an Apt
repository and would like to add a Red Carpet service, please contact us
and we'll be happy to oblige.

HOW TO GET IT
=============
(or, Gimme gimme gimme!)

If you are already running rcd, you can get the new versions of rcd,
rug, and red-carpet from the "Red Carpet 2" channel.  If you upgrade,
PLEASE UPGRADE ALL THREE PACKAGES AT ONCE, THEN RUN "rug restart"
AFTERWARD.  Unfortunately old versions of rug and red-carpet will not
work properly with the new version of rcd, nor will the new rug and
red-carpet work with an old rcd.  If you don't follow these directions,
you'll need to use rpm to do this by hand.  We're sorry about the
inconvenience and promise it won't happen again.

Otherwise, you can download packages for a variety of distributions from
ftp://ftp.ximian.com/pub/redcarpet2.

You can also find information on getting the source to the Red Carpet
client components by visiting the Ximian developers site at
http://developer.ximian.com/projects/source

You can get Open Carpet packages, source and more info on the project at
http://open-carpet.org