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

[Claus Schwarm <clschwarm googlemail com>]

On Tue, 2009-06-16 at 12:26 +0200, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
> 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.
> 

Mint has .mint files. [1]

But that doesn't solve the problem. Say yesterday Transmission just
released an amazing new version that you want to try. So you click on
the "Download" link.

The above tools would tell you that you either have Transmission
installed, already, or they will install the Transmission version in
your repository -- not the one you want to try.

But it's at least a workaround.

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

Some distros have their name in the user agent string. [2] A better
approach would be feature or capability detection [3] but there seems to
be no proper way for the above kind of features.


Best regards,
Claus

[1] http://linuxmint.com/software/
[2] http://user-agent-string.info/list-of-ua (scroll down)
[3] http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/using-capability-detection/