Cooperation with Npackd

Hello everybody,

Tim Lebedkov, the developer of Npackd (http://npackd.appspot.com/), a
package manager for Windows, reached out to me proposing a cooperation with
Zero Install.

We discussed the possibility of creating a webservice for transparently
converting between the package formats of Npackd and Zero Install, similar
to pom2feed (https://github.com/0install/pom2feed).

Some issues that need to be addressed for this to work:

 * Npackd supports installer EXEs while Zero Install only suports archives
as the package format.

 * Zero Install calculates hash values over extracted archives (allowing
deduplication and verification after installation). Npackd calculates hash
values of the archive files themselves.

 * The desktop integration extensions of the Zero Install feed format
represent file type associations as individual XML tags. Npackd handles
these with post-install scripts.

Any thoughts on this?

Regards
Bastian


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