Re: Gnome Package Manager?

[Hongli Lai <h lai chello nl>]

Foster, Gareth wrote:
> > What about autopackage.org?
>
>
> I wouldn't have a clue whether they provide a nice package management api. I
> do know they planned to tie into package management back ends at some point,
> but last time I checked, they hadn't - always seemed odd to me that that
> wasn't the priority, anything else ought to be a fallback method didn't it?

It hasn't been done yet because of lack of manpower. That is the primary 
reason. But there's one thing more important than making it integrate 
with the native database: making it WORK. After all, that is the goal, 
and we're already very busy with making it work well. :/

As for package management API: I would certainly be interested if 
there's enough demand for it.

> I don't know whether they have the metapackage idea in there either (a
> package composed of other packages), I felt this was a great way to offer
> users from windows land, a one file install method from the project web site
> in a style familiar to them, whilst leaveraging and playing nice with
> existing technology

The problem with this metapackage example is that it tries to introduce 
dependencies. But dependency names are different on each distribution 
(gtk2 on Fedora vs libgtk2 on Debian), among other problems.