New project idea - kde package manager for Mobile

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hey Laszlo,

On Friday, October 15, 2010 11:57:50 Chani wrote:
> why should kde have its own meego package manager, exactly?
> what benefit would it bring over a qt one?

Moreover, the arguments against current solutions sound pretty 
artificial ("too bloated", "plugins for backends, therefore not light-
weight"). A lot of thought and work has gone into these solutions, and 
they were written by people who know what their doing. From my 
experience, having plugins for different backends eases good design, and 
introduces only very little run-time overhead (while making the whole 
thing way more flexible and often future-proof).

I know it's always tempting to start a new project instead of re-using 
already written code, but in many cases, that just leads to another dead 
body in the cupboard on the development side, and one more half-assed 
solution that doesn't cut it and won't for a while. We've had that more 
than once already.

I'd recommend against re-writing a package manager. You'd not be the 
first one to do it, and it's quite a lot of work to get right. It would 
be a lot more benefitial to the whole of KDE to improve existing 
solutions, possibly by benchmarking them and looking where exactly there 
are possible performance bottlenecks (you'll likely run into the same 
class of problems while writing your own package manager, anyway), and 
spending time on UI-love for the existing solutions -- possibly by 
introducing a mobile UI.

The major problem of today's package managers is not that they're 
bloated, or not light-weight enough (whatever that might mean), but that 
their UIs are too complicated. Ideally, we'd have something with the 
ease of use of Android's Market (just as an example), but with the power 
of Linux packaging systems.

BTW, seeing you're from the archlinux camp, did you talk to Dario 
Freddi? AFAIK he's been working on package management UIs a while ago, 
he'll very likely have useful input for you.

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

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