From: Massimiliano Mirra <list@...>
Date: 2002-01-08T01:08:33+09:00
Subject: Re: APT-like RAA? (was: Re: snippet exchange)

On Mon, Jan 07, 2002 at 01:37:56PM +0900, Jack Dempsey wrote:
> The way i was thinking of this working would be this: someone has heard of a
> good library to use but doesn't want to spend the time finding it
> downloading etc...this little function will do it...basically, automate the
> process of finding, downloading and using...not very ambitious,and it would
> definitely need to be well thought out, but i think the idea could be useful
> in the end...perhaps a function that searches for a module and downloads it
> but doens't require it at the same time...whatever it is, this discussion
> can only help...

Sorry to keep quoting Debian, but the way we say that, over here, is:

apt-get install program-name<RET>

Next thing you know is that docs, libs, binaries, configs and headers
are all installed in the proper places and ready to use.

Now, that doesn't require any web service, just an http:// or ftp://
source set up in apt's config files.  The source also contains a list
of what it holds (with name, description and other data about
packages), that apt downloads and you use locally to select what you
will install.

This is an example of a list query:

$ apt-cache search ruby xml
librexml-ruby - pure Ruby non-validating XML parser supporting Namespaces, XPath
libxml-parser-ruby - The interface of expat for the scripting language Ruby.
nqxml - pure Ruby implementation of a non-validating XML processor
xmlrpc4r - XML-RPC support for Ruby

This is an example of a list entry:

$ apt-cache show xmlrpc4r
Package: xmlrpc4r
Priority: optional
Section: interpreters
Installed-Size: 512
Maintainer: akira yamada <akira@debian.org>
Architecture: i386
Version: 1.7.8-1
Depends: libruby (>= 1.6.0), nqxml | libxml-parser-ruby (>= 0.6.1), ruby-eserver
Filename: pool/main/x/xmlrpc4r/xmlrpc4r_1.7.8-1_i386.deb
Size: 70558
MD5sum: 9f91173b68784837e39dc0ed949008c6
Description: XML-RPC support for Ruby
 XML-RPC provides remote procedure calls over HTTP with XML. It is
 like SOAP but much easier. For more information see the XML-RPC
 homepage <URL:http:// www.xmlrpc.com/>. This package provides XML-RPC
 support for Ruby.

This is how you update the locally cached list:

$ apt-get update


All of this is done locally.  Such a system would be a real breeze to
implement on top of RAA, *if* everything was kept at the same place
and was organized in a well-thought out directory structure.  (Yes,
there's more to APT than this, it also shines at dipendence handling,
but let's KIS(S).)  Now, what about:

$ raa-get update

...gets the list of available software.

$ raa-cache search ruby xml

...displays a similar list as above.

$ raa-cache show xmlrpc4r

...displays a description as above.

$ raa-get install xmlrpc4r

...fetch and install xmlrpc4r, requiring you no extra step to use it
than to read the manual and type require 'xmlrpc/...' in your scripts.



Massimiliano