RFC: On-demand package installation API in kdelibs

[David Jarvie]

On Thu, July 29, 2010 11:11 pm, Marco Martin wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 10:55 PM, Lubos Lunak <l.lunak at suse.cz> wrote:
>
>>  Or we had a problem with Nepomuk in openSUSE 11.2 - we decided to turn
>> it off
>> by default and not even include the dependencies in the default
>> installation
>> or the liveCD (since they took some space). We rather quickly ended up
>> with
>> bugreports from users who tried to enable Nepomuk, got just a (not very
>> good
>> IIRC) error message and didn't realize they had to install additional
>> packages to get it to work.
>
> a thing that would come natural to me for it to use is if you try to
> open some weird file format from dolphin, no viewer/editors installed
> but there are available in the repositories.
> this could be a quite common situation (i don't expect to have things
> for rarely used files installed by default), and save significant
> hassle of googling what on earth can open this kind of file.

I also think this would be a very useful facility. Even if a distro's
policy was to only display a message saying which package was needed,
without offering to install it, it would sometimes save a lot of time
trying to figure out how to make something work. It would also allow the
distro to show alternative packages which provided the missing
functionality, so that you could choose which one you prefer (if any).

There has been too much emphasis in this thread on multimedia packages and
codecs. This idea has much wider applicability, and it shouldn't be
considered in such narrow terms.

-- 
David Jarvie.
KDE developer.
KAlarm author - http://www.astrojar.org.uk/kalarm