Gnome Package Manager?

["Foster, Gareth" <gareth foster siemens com>]

I thought I'd share this here, it was sparked by a recent gtkmm list post,
about how to install gtkmm on fedora. 

> >	I'm running Fedora Core 4 which isn't fully updated 
> unfortunately since it isn't connected to the Internet, nor 
> can be for a while.
> 	
> 
> That's a shame, because by far the best way to do this is:
> 
> % yum list | grep mm
> 
> Pick all the devel packages out of there (you might be able 
> to do another grep, | grep devel) and copy and paste them 
> into a command ...
> 
> % yum install (packagelist)
> 
> Next best bet is to pull the packages from fedora extras and 
> burn them to a CD, then on the internetless fedora box, do ...
> 
> % rpm -ivh /media/cdrecorder/*.rpm
> 
> Or similar.
> 
> If that fails or isnt an option, then you may need to 
> ./configure with prefix equals /usr rather than /usr/local, i 
> always get bitten by that on fedora.
> 

I then went on to waffle about this idea I've had floating around in my head
for ages.

> I always thought what would be great, seeing as every distro 
> that matters uses some sort of package management interface, 
> would be a libpackagemanger, a nice cpp interface to software 
> management for linux. This would be some sort of 
> freedesktop.org thing, which had specialisations for each 
> package tool or distro. 
> 
> class c_package_manager
> {
>   install_package();
>   remove_package();
> };
> 
> Then, it would be "just" a matter of knocking up a Gnome 
> Package manager and KDE package manager which ran on top of 
> this wonderful api. The next step would be metapackages, 
> gtkmm being the case in point, which gtkmm.org could link to, 
> just like a windows installer, the thing would just be an xml 
> file, which our new gnome package manager can read, to 
> install all the packages needed for this group.
> 
> <xml>
>  <package>
>   <name>gtkmm</name>
>   <req>gtkmm</req>
>   <req>gtkmm-devel</req>
>   <req>libsigc++</req>
>   <req>glibmm</req>
>   <req>et cetera</req>
>   <source>
>    <fedora>
>     <url>http:://url-for-fedora-extras</url>
>    </fedora>
>    <tarball>
>     <url>http:://url-for-fallback-to-source-code</url>
>   </source>
>  </package>
> <xml>
> 

I suppose doing this through freedesktop.org would allow you to have a focal
point, to stop situations like two people deciding that a gtkmm metapackage
contains two different sets of packages (one that includes the gnomemm stuff
and one that doesn't for example).

Ayway, before I start waffling about this again, I'll stop. Feedback
welcome.

Gaz