Humberto wrote: > > When I was writing the proposal, I thought it wold be neat to have a file type > like "multifile python module" that contained the source to a viewer, we could > also have a type like "i386/libc6/rpm" for a viewer. The app broker can > return a list like > > python - ftp://bar.baz/pub/viewer.py > compressed-multifile-python-tarfile - ftp://bar.baz/pub/fancy-viewer.tar.gz > i386/libc6/rpm - ftp://rpmfind.net/libc6/i386/viewer1.0-2.rpm > > and the user can select which one he wants to retreive. This brings up an interesting thought: How about using RPM or a modified version of it for our locus database (managed by the local app broker). If you think about it, we need some system to (1) Install new loci (2) Upgrade old loci (3) Remove loci (4) Check version numbers (5) Check dependencies (6) and store all sorts of info on the loci That sounds like RPM to me. Now, I'm thinking that we could actually use RPM, but there would be two problems: (1) RPM installs etc. under root (2) Not every UNIX system uses RPM, in fact only about half of the Linux systems But what if we modified it (it's GPL) to install etc. in the user's directory? Another advantage to RPM is that it compresses the package, which will make it easier to download those pesty viewers. So we'll define... i386/libc6/locus - ftp://locusfind.net/libc6/i386/viewer1.0-2.locus Oh yeah, and we can use the RPM-to-HTML rpmfind database for browsing loci available on the Web. So, WHAT DA YA THINK? Jeff -- J.W. Bizzaro mailto:bizzaro at bc.edu Boston College Chemistry http://www.uml.edu/Dept/Chem/Bizzaro/ --