I was some what curious as to if anybody would be interested in the idea of / developing a universal linux installer system?

My idea is as follows:

Establish a method to distribute any tarball to any user who is using any distribution.

I'm thinking it should be based on BitTorrent, but with a different file type to indicate that it should be opened by the installer system.

I suggest that DHT / Trackerless setup be used.

Suggestions or comments?

> universal linux installer system

there is one, its called source code.

edit> why on some polls can you see who voted for what and on others you cant?

>why on some polls can you see who voted for what and on others you cant?

It's determined by the person who starts the thread.

>there is one, its called source code.

Tis what I was referring to.
But a way to automatically download compile and install / uninstall with a single click (handling dependencies at the same time).

With the system I'm proposing, I just click a link on a Web Site.
The meta file that this link refers to will now automatically open in the installer system.
The installer system automatically downloads the source code + dependencies via bittorrent,

./configures
make
make install

for me.

Said metafile would be generated alongside the tarball.

this would potentially be a problem if you wanted to/had to pass certain flags in ./configure. For example, I always compile my own copy of mplayer because it doesn't do the gui by default. There's also a bunch of really natty features that are only enabled if you specifically tell it to compile them in.

Well yes .. theese are details ..

Of course you'd probably have aplace where you can pass configure flags .. (like and advanced button)

But probably if you'd go through all that trouble .. you might as well do it the old fashion way

this sort of thing usually bloats way out of control. that is why there are few existing solutions to this. there are planty of package managers that are distro dependant (apt-get, yum, etc), but to make a universal one, well it would be some accomplishment

It is a good idea, but will never work. Linux distributions are much more different from each other than the type of package they use. From my experience, Redhat and SuSE loves to place things in different paths than most of the other distributions. While they are all "Linux" (as in the kernel level), they are all basically different operating systems in a way.

Anyway, I don't see any problem with the current Linux system. All major distributions aimed at desktop users have a very good package manager (as mentioned by xhi), so they should stick with it. Dependency problem is never an issue if you picked a distro with a good package manager and plenty of packages available. Debian has easily over 16.000 packages available to install through apt-get/synaptic, for example.

Again, it sure would be good to some peoples to double click on any package and get it installed (I would hate it though, but I can see a lot of peoples liking the idea), but with the current implementation of Linux, I don't think it is possible...

Besides, if you actually are using a "user-friendly" distribution as Mandriva or Ubuntu, you should be able to install .rpm or .deb files by double-clicking on them anyway...

> It's determined by the person who starts the thread.
can you change it back to being able to view the voters? why would you want anonymous voting?


edit:
> I would hate it though
me too! i just feel smarter when i install from source

The idea is that we are still using source code instead of pre-compiled packages.
Often when I compile from source though, there are dependency issues that give me headaches.

I'm thinking what if there were a P2P system for accessing all linux source code on any distribution without additional effort from the developers. As soon as anything is used on any distribution it's available to all distributions.

Or in other words getting all repositories to share information,
and maybe done with source instead of deb / rpm packages?

But you'll have the same problem all over; how do you (or your tool)
determine what the user really wants out of a piece of software? How
do you decided whether, for example, to use berkleyDB, plain hashes or
the already installed postgres on my machine for the postfix I'd like
to install? How do you know whether I want such and such program that
can either use KDE or simple Qt to use either of those? Or if the user
has postfix installed and requests to install exim AND sendmail - what do
you do in terms of set-up choices? I think that trying to do this distro
independent will be impossible.


Cheers,
Tink

This is essentially the way in which Gentoo works, you can set global flags for compiling, or package specific flags to over-ride or add functionality to specific packages.

Obviously its not the solution to _every_ distro, but it does work well in and of itself. To the best of my memory there are very few depenency issues that I have encountered.

You're solving a problem that doesn't exist. If you want an automated install, download an ISO, burn it and run it. No muss, no fuss.

New idea what about an official organization setup just to mirror packages of various types.
RPM, Deb, Tgz, GRP, etc.

All distributions would be responsible to conform to this one standard, absolutely everything available from one distribution would be available to another within a day or so, to allow for compile time.

Packages would gradually be phased out provided they allowed the same functionality.
For example Deb packages would eventually replace RPM's.

Mirrors would exist in every country any distro of any size
could submit packages for approval.

<offtopic>
geesh.. i didnt notice it before, but you registered in 2006 and Pink Floyd was still available.. how lucky is that..
</offtopic>

Not that it's a bad idea, I just don't see how distro programmers are going to want to unite on a single standard for software installation. The whole purpose of the different packages is someone not liking the way a certain packaging system works.

For instance, I'm not too keen on DEB or RPM packaging (I have yet to try TGZ). I mean, within RPM alone, there's several different subsets, such as SuSE rpms, Mandriva rpms, Fedora rpms, RHEL rpms, ..., the list goes on, and none of them are interchangable. No Fedora rpms on a Mandriva system. What don't I like about RPMs? I don't think the package managers that are available for it are well-developed enough. For URPMI (Mandriva), I have a great deal of trouble finding repositories to add (besides easyurpmi.zarb.org), and it takes forever to update the synthesis lists. With YUM (Fedora, Yellow Dog), I find the dependency calculation system a little clumsy, but the number of available packages is amazing.

My favourite so far, is Gentoo's Ebuilds. They're pretty slick, and clean, but the only thing I have against them, is it takes so darn long to install something.

I am part of a SourceForge project called pkgswarm, and the whole purpose of the project was to provide a way of obtaining packages via torrents. I'm still working away on the project, but I'm not sure who else is.