[Soc-coordination] Offline Updating Proposal

[Daniel Burrows]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 10:26:35AM -0500, Chris Oliver <excid3 at gmail.com> was heard to say:
> I have two ideas here, one is to create a framework that adapts working
> environments to be able to download packages using common tools for the
> offline machine. The second idea, from Daniel Burrows, was to actually
> modify the frontends to support this sort of activity. The latter idea would
> be a more limited approach to the task, as it would only be modifying
> existing tools which are not already cross-platform as my original idea was
> to include. However this provides a level of simplicity that cannot be
> obtained with the framework. I'm somewhat lost on which idea I should
> choose. Any pointers?

  I've read your proposal three times, and I still don't understand:

  (a) why my suggestion would be less cross-platform than your
      proposal.

  (b) why my suggestion would increase sneakernetting.  (my offhand
      comment earlier was regarding the most trivial first
      implementation step; ten words later I explained how to lift that
      limitation)

  If you have a Unix system as the networked computer, you can run
the modified package manager on the networked computer just as well
as you could have under your proposal (using chroot, setting RootDir,
whatever).  If you don't (the networked computer is, say, Windows) you
can't run the package manager there under either system and so you'll
have to run it on the target machine instead.

  The only thing which needs to be cross-platform in your proposal
is the code to process the list of URLs and download them.  I was just
suggesting that you might as well integrate the rest into an existing
package manager instead of writing yet another package manager from
scratch.  (in fact, I suspect you could write a short routine into the
apt libraries that generates a file in your interchange format, which
would let any package manager be used in your framework)

  Does that make any more sense, or have I completely misunderstood
your proposal?

  Daniel