Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (392 mails)

[Martin Schlander <suse@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Benjamin Weber has been writing about his metapackage project a few times 
recently but hasn't received much feedback.

So I thought I'd try to help promoting it a bit, since I think it has the  
potential to solve some very common issues, like the never ending debate 
about multimedia codecs. Of course we won't be able to include the codecs, 
but with Benjamins project in the distro we could make such things as 
installing those codecs ridiculously simple. 

You'll find a package of the metapackage yast2-module here:
http://bw.uwcs.co.uk/mp/yast2-mpp-0.0-0.suse102.noarch.rpm

I've set up a quick proof of concept web page to show some examples of how 
this metapackage handling can help users:
http://suse.linuxin.dk/ymp

The page is optimized for Konq only, which doesn't matter much, as this is 
just a proof of concept, and currently only konqueror has support for the 
metapackages in the abovementioned package anyway.

Here are some screenshots of what happens when the user clicks a link to a 
metapackage:
http://suse.linuxin.dk/ymp/catalogue.png
http://suse.linuxin.dk/ymp/packages.png
http://suse.linuxin.dk/ymp/settings.png
http://suse.linuxin.dk/ymp/status.png

The "metapackage" (*.ymp) itself is an xml file, with information about 
repositories and packages to install, the syntax is very self explanatory, 
try downloading this file and opening it with your favourite text editor:
http://suse.linuxin.dk/ymp/kde.ymp

The metapackage handler can do much more than what has been described above. 
It could pontentially also be used to add repos only, without installing any 
packages.

It can be used to install packages instantly when you find them in the package 
search, also developed by Benjamin. See:
http://benjiweber.co.uk:8080/webpin/index-test.jsp
(hint: look for the "install now" links in search results).

I'm sure Benjamin would be happy with any testing and comments. And it would 
be nice to have some sort of official comment as to whether this is something 
we have a chance of seing included in the distro.
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