Greetings,

On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 5:34 AM, Deepesh Garg <deepes...@gmail.com> wrote:

> 1) Have a new packaging type which indicate that this is an installable
> application. Pom file for such apps can include things like description,
> display name, icon file, location to put application launchers, type of
> application (desktop app, mobile app, online app(?), GUI based/command line
> etc)..
>

Please, I beg of you, do not create yet another installation format. Before
you do this, justify not using RPM/DEB or MSI, whichever applies for your
target environments. All of which, yes even MSI, are far better than
anything you are likely to create.

2) Create a maven goal to search configured repositories using criteria
> specified in options (packaging type, artifact id, wildcard text search in
> description etc). This function is useful on its own and in this case can
> be used to search installable applications in repository.
>

This is totally outside the scope of Maven, and frankly I don't really
foresee it as being generally useful in any way. Who wants to type out ""
mvn package:search -Dpackage=rpm -Ddescription=\*angry\ birds\* "" when
they can just fire up a new chromium tab and Google search it?


> 3) Create a maven goal to install app. This will read pom description and
> create application icons etc (this function will depend on platform and
> will do whatever is required for current platform. Like for Linux it can
> create .desktop files in specific directories or for Windows it can create
> shortcuts in start menu.). This goal can also generate command line to
> launch the application including all dependencies in classpath. This way
> maven itself will not be required to launch the app but will still use
> repository (as suggested by Brett).
>

Again, please don't do this! There are already great tools to manage
packages, see my response to 1) above, then read the manual for yum/apt-get
and whatever M$ has for MSI files. Again, all of which, yes even MSI, are
far better than anything you are likely to create.


> 4) Once the command line tools are available, a nice GUI wrapper can be
> provided to search repositories for installable apps and install and
> uninstall apps.
>

The tools to do this already exist. See the GUI front ends for all the
tools I already mentioned for further reference.


> This way maven repositories can also serve the function of app store and I
> think it won't require too much effort as all the hard work is already
> done.
>

Allowing a Maven Repository Manager (MRM) to perform as a target RPM/DEB
repository, or MSI storage shed, is a positive thing. Unfortunately, that
isn't what you describe though, you keep saying a Maven repository, which
isn't quite the same thing.

At least 1 MRM already has the ability to do this:
https://code.google.com/p/nexus-yum-plugin/

-Jesse

-- 
There are 10 types of people in this world, those
that can read binary and those that can not.

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