[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] The future of the Application installer

[From: Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri]

On 11/7/05, Marius Vollmer <marius.vollmer at nokia.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> as you all know, the current Application installer sucks more than
> Cygnus X-1 [1], and this needs to change.
>
> The current plan is to use the full power of dpkg+apt and put a nice
> GUI on top of it.  The GUI design is pretty mature already and will be
> nice and friendly but still powerful.  It will very likely be
> implemented by canibalizing synaptic or some other existing graphical
> package manager.
>
> So, do you have any comments, feature requests, etc that go beyond
> would you have on Debian already?  Something that you have on Debian
> but a bsolutely don't want to lose?  Please let me know!

Nice, I read your replies to already post comments, everything is great.

But I would recommend smart over apt: http://labix.org/smart
AFAIK Ubuntu will change to it, it even hired Gustavo Niemeyer (main
dev), and Mandriva is using it... it's flexible and fast enough.

I'm happy we'll now be able to add sources to apt/sources.list, that's
a great thing. I also hope we get a free packages repository,
something in the line of debian, that packages must have a maintainer
and be approved by a board of reviewers, and have this to come by
default.

About GUI, I would go with the mentioned route of filter packages with
debtags and, if possible, have screenshots and related information.

The main goal must be using all the open source power to make the
difference to other devices. We will have a lot of (free & open)
software in near future, no other platform provides it right now.

--
Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
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