On Mon Dec 06, 2004 at 10:19:20 +1100, Matthew Palmer wrote: >On Mon, Dec 06, 2004 at 08:18:15AM +1100, john gibbons wrote: >> Dumbo (that's me) sees an application on the internet he wants to >> try. He clicks 'download'. Easy. A little window says 'Download >> in progress'. A pause . A little window says 'Download complete'. A >> little sign pops up saying 'Install? Yes, No'. >> Dumbod clicks 'Yes'. A brief pause then a friendly little window >> says, 'Install complete'. Dumbo then happily clicks on the new Icon >> or application name and, hooray!!, it runs. > >Not that I've tried it for quite a while, but I was sure that your average >web browser these days had enough MIME smarts to be able to fire up a >package manager GUI and do the package install rhumba with you (root privs >notwithstanding). > >About the only thing that might be missing from the process is the automatic >satisfaction of package dependencies, and a quiet "ptooee!" from the package >management GUI if your system couldn't install the necessary dependencies. >But that's hardly an insurmountable challenge. Add the ability for Debian >systems to install .RPMs (via alien) and you've got a good chance that what >you want is already available (modulo the incomplete metadata and namespace >games that may still plague RPMs).
But this still relies on someone going to the effort of making a .deb (or .rpm) available in the first place. No good if the developer just makes a source tarball available. (But this equally happens on windows too.. it is a lazy developer problem.) Benno -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
