resident package database update

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Tue, 12 Jul 2016 13:51:34 -0700, Seth Arnold wrote:
>I can understand the desire but this would lead to an incredible
>increase in complexity

Not necessarily.

For Arch Linux a developer introduced a tool for Flatpak that should
become more or less equal to the official package management. IIUC the
developer also was thinking about integration into the official package
manager, but I guess there is no acceptance. What I'm tying to say
is, that it is possible to integrate snaps, Flatpak, Nix/Guix or what
ever else to the already existing package management of a distro.
Imagine you even could write a simple wrapper that handles both, the
distro's package management and snaps. I'm very skeptic regarding the
idea of the snap, Flatak etc. approach. Developers from upstream and
some PPAs already provide installs to /opt, that perfectly integrate to
the rest of the install, but that don't use shared libs, instead they
ship with all the required dependencies. IMO the /opt approach is
better.

However,

"Snaps don’t intrinsically depend on the Ubuntu store, that’s just what
snapd does today, and we expect people will have different stores for
their snaps in future." - http://snapcraft.io/

Assumed there should be acceptance for e.g. snaps, then distros most
likely will provide their own tools. Not necessarily a "store", but
much likely an integration to the already existing package management.
This would not mix e.g. deb, rpm, pacman with snaps, just the
management of both, the classic package management and the snaps could
be handled by one tool.

For Arch Linux there are already tools available, that handle official
packages providing binaries with the official tool to build from
source, so that building software from source from a user
repository, could be done by the same commands, that are used to
install binaries from official repositories. Actually such tools are
just wrappers. The difference to integrating snaps just is, that those
tools build regular packages, but a wrapper also could handle different
formats.

2 Cents,
Ralf