goodies-management

[Brian J. Tarricone]

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Benedikt Meurer wrote:
> Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
> 
>>Option B)
>>
>>  A "real" goodies manager for listing/downloading/installing goodies
>>  from source.
[snip]

I haven't finished reading the entire thread, so this may be menioned
elsewhere, but in my mind, this isn't enough.  There needs to be a
mechanism to download and install precompiled packages (whether they're
.debs, RPMs, Solaris pkgs, etc.).  It seems to me that the whole point
of this goodies manager is to make it easier on newbies and "average
joes" to learn about other available packages and install them easily.
We can't assume they have a full set of compiler tools and the
appropriate -devel packages installed.

This can, of course, be done in steps.  Implement the build-from-source
option only, but design the ability to list and install binary packages
into the XML format, something like this:

<binary-pkg os='linux' sub-os='fedora'
      os-ver='4'>http://mirror.xfce.org/downloads/foo.rpm</binary-pkg>
<binary-pkg os='solaris'
      os-ver='9'>http://mirror.xfce.org/downloads/foo.local</binary-pkg>

(Damned line wrapping.)  I'm sure this can be improved, that's just my
5-second idea.  Ideally, some OS/distro detection can be built into the
goodies manager as well so the user doesn't have to pick their distro
from a list.  For the far future, maybe an 'advanced' mode where the
user can ignore the binary package and compile from source to change
compile options (ssl vs. no ssl for mailwatch, for example).

Anyway, just my thoughts.  This sounds like a really cool idea, and I
hope something useful comes out of it.  I'm afraid my python-phobia will
preculde much development effort from me, otherwise I'd help out more
than just throwing suggestions around ^_^.

	-brian

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