[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Aplication installer

[From: Marius Vollmer]

"ext Gustavo Barbieri" <barbieri at gmail.com> writes:

> On 7/19/05, Renato Araujo Oliveira Filho <renato.filho at indt.org.br> wrote:
>> 
>> I made the abiword port to maemo, and i will make the deb package. The
>> problem is that the package has some dependencies (libfribidi,
>> libglade2, libgnomeprintui) that are not installed in maemo base. How do
>> you suggest to solve this problem?
>
> IMO you have 2 options:
>  - put it all together and make it have no dependencies, maybe use
> static linkage

My gut reaction would be to go with this alternative...

>  - have the package to have NO dependencies, but make it install the
> other packages itself. This is a hack since it could be done by
> apt-get, but help share libraries. In other words:
>      if not dependency_installed(x):
>         get(x)
>         install(x)

...since the "dependency_installed" routine will likely duplicate alot
of what the package management system is (supposed to be) doing
anyway.  Also, if AbiWord does not formally depend on libfribidi, but
libfribidi is a separate package, then removing the libfribidi package
will not be prevented by the package manager and AbiWord will break.


One other real option is to ignore the Application Installer and just
use apt+dpkg on the command line.  I think it is unavoidable to have
real package management on the system, and eventually there also must
be a real GUI package manager, like synaptic or the one from GPE.