Re: [system-tools] package-maintaining

[Carlos Garnacho <carlosg gnome org>]

Hi Karel!,

On Thu, 2005-01-13 at 21:12 +0100, Karel Demeyer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm new to this list, and I didn't read all the archives yet :| I just
> joined to give a feature request.  I'm not a coder, I don't know if it's
> possible, but I'm a gnome-user and I think following would be super;
> 
> Could it be possible to have a "Software installer" in the G-s-t ? It
> could be some frontend-backend thing.  So, you have one frontend GUI
> that looks the same for all distro's/package-managers and a backend per
> package-manager.  Plus, for all distros there should be a GUI to "./
> configure && make && make install" that keeps the source for de-
> installation.  the frontend should be a bit like Synaptic does for
> Debian.  I don't know really, but I think it should be possible to have
> the same GUI for other distro's/pkg-managers.  no ?  It should be noce
> to have an overview of all installed packages, click to install or
> remove packages etc ... the same for each gnome-user, whatever distro
> they use. :)  
> 
> again, I'm not a coder, don't know about it.  maybe some others have
> proposed this before and I'm nr. X in a row... 

This would be a really nice feature which is needed in other parts of
GST (i.e: installing NTP stuff instead of giving a silly warning), but
there are some issues that will make this a bit hard.

The main problem I see is the diversity of package models (source
packages vs precompiled packages, hability to fetch them from internet,
etc...), this by itself is not the big problem, but to give users a
proper experience, the backend should notify to the frontend the stage
of the installation (downloading/compiling/installing/error/couldn't
connect/conflicting files/...), and bidirectional comunication is still
missing in GST...

The next development will be probably aimed to fix this, so it would be
a nice feature to think about, but at the moment the best you could find
is RedCarpet from Ximian/Novell, which already manages a couple of
packaging systems

	Regards, and sorry for the delay answering

> 
> I'd like to hear some respons though :)
> 
> friendly greeting,
> 
> Karel 'scapor' Demeyer.
> 
> BTW: this backend-frontend-thing would make it possible to also create a
> QT/CLI interface and use the same on all distributions while they still
> use _their_ packaging-system

Yep, that's the great advantage of the backend/frontend arquitecture,
althought it isn't being used a lot (still :)

> 
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