Just some thoughts

Hi,

I'm wondering how we can promote the use of aap with little effort.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect that aap is going to replace
configure/make in the near future for a lot of packages.

But what can be done?

When you want to use an application, there are some possibilities:
- get a binary package
  drawback: not always the latest version/patchlevel, you have to depend
  on another person for you to supply it
- get the source and build it yourself
  drawback: you need the tools and it takes more time than installing a
            binary package
- for most applications, there are two versions that are maintained:
  stable and latest/test. For some packages I always want the latest
  (vim in my case), for others I would like a stable package (the window
  manager).

What I would like to have is aap recipes for a lot of applications that
let my say:
aap --install <package> --version=stable|latest|.. --delivery=binary|source|..

This would download all necessary software (include e.g. all patches for vim
if I specify latest), if needed build it and install it. This will make
use of the default configure/make/.. that's inside the package and supplies
a convience layer on top of it. Later the configure/make/... can be replaced
by the aap recipe if that's possible (You will need to have support of the
maintainer of the application, otherwise the aap recipe can become out of
sync when the configure/make/... is changed.).

Which options are needed is off course open for discussion, but I think
it would be nice to have a standard interface (options) that all aap
recipes support.

What do you think? 

Have fun,

Aschwin Marsman

--
http://www.marsman.org              [email protected]


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