Monday 13 May 2013

Re: App installer design: click packages

Hello!
I want to ask some questions about new packaging manager (which I awaited for many years...) and add some requests while it's not too late.

Questions:

1) Which libraries you will consider as BASE system?

I hope not just "Ubuntu default installation" will treated as base system in purposes of distributive- and OS- independence... This set of libraries and it's versions will change in time, new libraries will require some system calls which is not available in older kernel versions.

Also if this library set is quite small, could they be placed in every package?

2) Do you plan to use components in packages?

Some details required about this question. Let's assume we want to pack Qt SDK with your brand new packaging manager. It will consist of Qt Creator, Qt library itself, documentation and sources. And of course, it would be convenient to include GCC or some different compiler it same package.

But we want set of packages without unconvenient dependencies...

I suggest to add support of "package of packages" as it done in Mac OS X (also, Qt SDK installer also could do this). Back to example, single Qt SDK package with several components packages inside, and we can choose which to install. If we already have compiler, we click to not install this component.

Of course, this "package of packages" on top of plain packages, which installing by single click...

I hope to see restore functionality (if we want to reset package to defaults and restore missing files).

3) Will directory with contents of package include it's version?

P.S.
Excuse me for my worse english...