Re: The need for an official GNUstep desktop

[Adrian Robert]

On Aug 27, 2006, at 5:20 PM, Andrew Sveikauskas wrote:

> On 2006-08-27 16:57:18 -0400 Adrian Robert <arobert@cogsci.ucsd.edu> 
> wrote:
>
> > Packages would need to be based on source code / GNUstep-make.
>
> What about a package manager framework that handed off actual package 
> management to NSBundles?  Have code bundles for RPM, dpkg, BSD pkg 
> tools, etc.  Each bundle could have code to query, install, remove, 
> upgrade, check for updates, etc., specific to that platform.

This might be a good longer term project -- an installer / app updater 
that coexists w/package managers on different platforms.  But if the 
platform's package manager is decent and there's a maintainer who 
supplies gnustep packages to it, the only functionality that would 
really be needed is something to help the user choose GNUstep over 
GNOME or KDE to start up in X.  And I think this facility already 
exists in most distributions as part of the xdm-equivalent component.

The idea I was proposing would be for the installer / updater to 
operate separately from distribution-based package management.  It's 
not really needed for distributions where GNUstep packages exist (as 
now for Debian), but on other distributions, it picks up the slack.  
It's like the Ximian "red carpet" app in the early Gnome days.

Also, if the infrastructure for this were built (a central repository 
containing "latest released" installer packages of GNUstep apps), it 
would make the job of distribution maintainers easier.  And getting / 
updating packages onto the repository would be the responsibility of 
app maintainers (if they wanted their apps to get widely distributed 
they would do it), so it would not be much work once up.