replacing XMMS

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sun, 25 Apr 2004 11:38:53 -0400 (EDT), duncan brown wrote:

> average joe doesn't want to use yum, he wants to be able to double click
> an icon on his desktop and have things taken care of.  no command line, no
> searching through a gui.

I do understand you, but that doesn't change my perspective. A "random
package" at an arbitrary site on the Internet may have dependencies on
packages found on the same site or a completely different site. It needs
more for a one-click web-based installation to be successful.
 
> now, say he wants to install the cd2ogg rpm from
> http://www.linuxadvocate.net/yum/fedora/1/linuxadvocate/cd2ogg-2.1-fc1.i386.rpm
> 
> now, he doesn't have cdparanoia installed (which is one of the
> requirements) but doesn't want to add my yum repository since this is
> basically a one off install... so, all he really should do (ideally in his
> mind) is click on the rpm link which should bring up the option in
> mozilla/firefox to use a helper application.

Just that ".rpm" usually is served as RealAudio MIME type and not
RPM:

$ grep rpm /etc/mime.types 
application/x-rpm               rpm
#audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin    rpm

> it downloads, the helper
> application loads the rpm, says you need cdparanoia and installs that
> along with the rpm.  no command line required, IT'S TAKEN CARE OF FOR HIM.

Or with many problems like we have currently when a user downloads a
"random package" (still quoting you here ;) and double-clicks on it in his
browser, e.g. Konqueror, and it attempts at installing the package with
the redhat-install-packages helper tool and fails because of unsolvable
dependencies.

Before we attempt at simplifying installation of random packages manually
downloaded from arbitrary locations, Fedora Extras should come to life
and provide a good foundation of extra packages and a web of mirror sites
which is known to yum/up2date/apt _by default_.

> does someone have to deal with command line flags to install winamp or
> yahoo messenger?

Apples and oranges. In particular if an installer .exe contains enough
DLLs to overwrite system files if need be. It's a usual installation
scenario that Joe User gets a graphical error dialog telling him that
Foo 8.1 is required for the installation to succeed.

> all this can be solved with letting synaptic take command line options
> (transparent to the desktop user) to install a package and resolve the
> dependencies for the person. 

Provided that the package sources are known to the APT-RPM backend.
Same for Yum.