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

[From: Aleksandr Koltsoff]

Hello, this is a late reply but might be documented anyway.

On Monday 07 November 2005 14:16, Marius Vollmer wrote:
> as you all know, the current Application installer sucks more than
> Cygnus X-1 [1], and this needs to change.

Personally I think the AI is wonderful ;-). Seriously though, what about this 
idea (not going into implementation issues here):
- have AI retrieve a categorized software catalog over maemo (and maybe some 
other site for N-supported software if there ever will be such a thing). In 
short, multiple repo support, maybe with an XML file rooted at maemo.org for 
the first time.
- For each application, make it possible to download a textual (localized) 
description of the package and a screenshot. Esp the screenshot. Also a link 
to the homepage of the project/package if such exists.
- These things probably should be centralized in maemo.org or some repo at 
least. I'm not sure whether the downloadable packages should also be 
distributed via centralized repos, but that would surely cut down 
intermittant problems with web servers going offline and back off (other than 
maemo.org that is).
- The user could then just install the package by pressing 'Install now' and 
AI2 would download the package and install it (if no dependency problems).

More feedback on the reasons why package installations fail would also be 
appreciated. And no, I don't think that "Package already installed" would cut 
it ;-).

There are also other ideas but they're pretty silly so I thought I'd just 
write down the not-very-silly ones.

ak.