Point-and-klik Linux Software Installation?

bfree writes "While you may have come across klik before, you might not be aware of some of the major changes which have been taking place over the last few months. If you visit the old klik site you will see a link to the Next Generation klik, which aims to provide a web interface to install the entire collection of Debian packages, letting you grab any package from sid (and its dependencies) and 'install' it into its own location, similar to the system outlined in this recent slashdot story." See below for more on klik.

bfree continues: This is not the only change in klik recently however, now applications are built into compressed image (cmg) files rather then stored as application directories. This means that you can store the application on any filesystem and move it around at will. Klik no longer totally depends on kde. Where previously klik could only be used with konqueror, now you can also use firefox and elinks, and where previously kdialog was required, now any of dialog|Xdialog|kdialog should work.

Klik now also supports more distributions fully. The officially supported list of distributions is now Knoppix (3.7), Kanotix (BHX), Linspire 5.0 and Simply Mepis (2004.04). Klik assumes that you will have installed at least the lowest version of any package which is present in all supported distributions and build the applications as such. If a package you want klik to install depends on a package in this base system it will not be included in the cmg so you must have it installed or add it to the cmg by hand afterwards. If you want to try using klik on another distribution, your results will primarily depend on whether or not your distribution has the packages the cmg depends on and assumes are present. So you will certainly fail to install kde applications on a distribution with no kde (as all the supported distributions have kde), but programs with simpler, or less common and therefore missing from some supported distributions, dependencies can work just fine.

One of the best ways to demonstrate the power of klik's techiniques is with the Christmas present from probono, an OpenOffice.org cmg for version 1.9.65. With this cmg (which runs on far more distributions then klik's supported list, especially as it uses Linux transparent iso compression rather then cramfs) you can download one 100M file to try out the preview release of Ooo, no need to upgrade any parts of your system and if the system has been setup by root to use cmg files there is also no need to even be root. I think this demonstrates the very best feature of bundled applications, you can try a potentially reckless preview release of software without having to upgrade your system.

Comments

Re:Sounds good to me

[Coryoth]

completely missed the point.

Then we're talking around each other, because you seem to have missed my point.

Debian's "easy" system isn't easy because of its size (as the autopackage faq suggests) but rather because of their strict adherence to policy standards.

We're talking about installing some software. It is "easy" to install software on Debian if it is in the Debian package repository. If it is not, then how exactly are you planning on installing it? Compile from source? Not "easy". Download a third party provided DEB package? That ought to work, but that's hardly easy for the developer who has to provide a DEB package, a Fedora RPM, a SuSE RPM, a mandrake RPM etc., and then there's the issue that maybe the DEB was for Ubuntu and linked against some libraries in Ubuntu that aren't in Debian stable yet. In short, installing software that is not in Debian's repositories is hard. This mostly doesn't matter because Debian's repositories are BIG so the odds of wanting to install something that isn't there are rather small.

You can discuss policy standards all you like, but in the end if the software isn't in Debian, it isn't likely to be following those standards.

Let's be clear anyway: Autopackage is not a replacement for dpkg, apt, and all the usual Debian goodness. It is complementary to all of that, and is meant to provide an easy way for those "not in the Debian repository" packages to still be easy to install (and at the same time allow developers to package once, instead of "once for each distribution").

And you've missed a different point. klik-style packages ideally are to be installed by end users, not administrators.

Autopackage is about empowering users not just administrators. A user can go to the homepage for [insert random application here], download the autopackage file provided there by the developers, then just double click to run it and up comes a little installer that checks and resolves dependencies. One of the key points of Autopackage is for binaries to be relocatable. That means a non-root user can still install an autopackaged file - it just gets installed to their home directory instead of systemwide. Autopackage is not meant to manage a distribution - Debian and Redhat and SuSE already do that pretty well. It is about providing a way for extra third party application not already in the distribution to be easily installed by users.

Jedidiah.