Pup suggestion

[Peter Backlund <peter backlund home se>]

Hi.

This is something I suggested on IRC a few days ago, and was asked to
drop onto this list.

Basically what I'd like to see in Pup is a way to deal with a group of
packages at once, distributed as one entity. The point is that the user
should be able to download a single file from the web, double-click it
in the file manager (and/or drag it somewhere) and have Pup handle the
installation. This is how software is usually distributed on other
platforms.

The idea is to have an archive with metadata, let's say a .yar (for "yum
archive"), which is basically a zip file with one or more rpm packages
in the RPMS/ directory, and a file containing metadata with default
selections and possibly a .repo file to import into the global
repository list, to allow for automatic updates. The .yar mime-type is
associated with Pup.

A good example where this would've been useful is the newly released
OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta. It was distributed as a tarball with rpms.
Currently, there is no way to handle this situation short of unpacking
and installing manually. system-config-packages does not handle more
than one package at a time, and does not resolve deps against remote
repositories. 

Adobe might for example package their suite as adobe-common,
adobe-photoshop, adobe-acrobat etc, and if you order the "Adobe
Photoshop for Linux" CD, your double click the .yar archive containing
adobe-common and adobe-photoshop. Since you already have adobe-common
installed from "Adobe Acrobat for Linux", you only install the adobe-ps
subpackage. And Adobe might supply a .repo file (with http
authentication!) for keeping your products up-to-date.

This, together with a stable and well-defined package environment such
as RHEL, would make the process of installing 3:rd party software on
Linux a lot easier.

What do you think?

/Peter Backlund