goodies-management

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Benedikt Meurer schrieb:
> Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
> 
>>Hej!
>>
>>I'm just talking to Johannes on IRC. We discussed some basic stuff and
>>ended up thinking that we would make up a good team for working on the
>>"goodies manager" (we're both German and our knowledge appears to be
>>almost on the same level).
> 
> 
> Maybe you could outline what you plan to do exactly? Do you want to help 
> to improve the installer or do you want to do a separate "goodies manager"?

Maybe I should mention we also were somewhat unsure about what you had
in mind exactly. These are the two main ways we talked about:


Option A)

  GUI for listing/downloading/running available installers (one for
  each goodie).

  Installers for each goodie are stored on a server which is accessable
  by the goodies manager. The user selects goodies he wants to
  install/uninstall and the manager fetches the necessary installers
  from the web and runs one after the other until everything is done.

  --
  Personally, I dislike this solution since downloads would be larger
  and coordination of packaging and the download directory might lead
  into complications.


Option B)

  A "real" goodies manager for listing/downloading/installing goodies
  from source.

  Each goodie provides a file with compile options and information about
  version, name etc. The goodie's source tarball, once it is released,
  are transfered to a server which is accessable by the goodies manager.
  Maybe there's a cronjob running on it, which writes the list of
  available goodies into an XML file or something like that.

  The goodies manager updates this file on startup and displays the
  goodies (and determines which already are installed etc.). The user
  selects which ones he'd like to install/uninstall. The goodies manager
  downloads the information file and the goodies' source tarballs,
  unpacks them and runs an installation wizard for each one. During
  installation the installed/manipulated files are logged and stored
  somewhere on the disk (used for uninstallation later).

  --
  That's the way we'd prefer. There'd be lots of advantages (goodies
  remain as sources, downloads are smaller, there's much lower effort in
  providing goodies to the goodies manager etc.)


That's it. How do you think about that? I'd really appreciate more
details about what you discussed with nestu.

Regards,
Jannis