goodies-management

[Benedikt Meurer]

Wit Wilinski wrote:
>>I had an idea of some kind of "goodies-manager", while reading the 
>>discussion with the mailwatch-plugin.
> 
> Nice idea.But what about dependency tracking? What if we provided
> statically linked plugins?

You haven't try to load a linux-elf-i386 module into a solaris-elf-sparc
panel process yet, have you? ;-)

Personally I think the 'goodies-manager' idea is a good point. I was
talking to nestu about this some time ago. The idea was to have a single
program, which downloads software descriptions from xfce.org (as XML
file), and provides the user with a list of applications to install,
tracking dependencies using pkg-config. That's pretty much what
InstallIt is all about, except that it procudes a single .bin file which
includes the installer instead of having a separate installer.
Personally, I'd really love to see an improved InstallIt for Xfce 4.4,
but I don't have time to work on it ATM. It'd be nice to transform it
into an installation manager, so we don't need to ship the installer
with every .bin file (it should therefore be rewritten in C or Python,
as Ruby+deps is very unlikely to be installed on a non-FreeBSD system).

If somebody wants to work on this, just let me know and we can start to
work out a plan for the next generation Xfce installer.

Benedikt