Re: [Nautilus-list] Nautilus Goals

[Ed McKenzie <eem12 cornell edu>]

On Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 09:17:41PM -0400, mitch nuclear physics gatech edu wrote:
> Wow, I never knew my post would end up leading to such bickering. Anyway,
> while giving Nautilus another try, I wondered about the issue of rpms and
> debs. It would be nice if Nautilus could install rpms and debs. Perhaps a
> nifty little install manager within Nautilus? Perhaps Nautilus should use
> some component of red carpet to do fancy installs, check deps, get deps,
> etc.....? Then again, maybe it should just attempt to install it
> straight up? I think the red carpet component option would be the
> best. Handling deps, etc... with rpms is a pain in the ass and red carpet
> has already aimed and continues to aim on handling these problems. There
> is no sense in Nautilus having some install manager duplicating it. Any
> thoughts on this?  

I disagree, at least until redcarpet stops breaking rpmdb by
installing everything with --force.  Should plain GNOME should have a
branded software installer?

There's also the question of "what exactly is a software installer,
anyway?"  Red Carpet users have to know way too much about individual
packages and conflicts and so on.  The way Anaconda handles things
(packages in functional categories) is probably the more useful view
for people coming from Windows/MacOS.  'rpm -qa |wc -l' gives me 607.
Are there _really_ that many items of useful software on my system?
Should I have to care that postgresql is broken into like ten
packages?  Users should decide what they want to do, rather than what
bits they want on their disk.  The package manager should be smart
enough to figure out that if I have "task-python-devel" and
"postgresql" installed, I just might want the intersection of that
("postgresql-python") too.  Whether it actually installs it is a
matter of user preference, but that should be an option.
</soapbox>

Anyway, rpmtool3 (ftp://nebulascape.dyndns.org/pub/rpmtool) aims to
cater to both crowds (and find a better name), but it's nowhere near
there yet.  Its user interface does need to become good friends with
bonobo-python -- there's no point to having rpmtool-scented vapor if
you can't enjoy it in the comfort of your very own Nautilus window.

I hear Eazel's installer was one of the best, and that has the added
bonus of being complete.  I don't know if/how well it could be
integrated into Nautilus (is that even a good idea?), or whether it
can resolve deps for remote packages it doesn't know about [I suspect
not.  AFAIK, it's not possible to extract an RPM package header over
ftp/http without downloading the entire RPM, which is why rpm updaters
can't resolve deps without remote servers caching said headers.]

-ed