standard dependancy system

[Mildred]

Hi,

I thought about a system that could help installing third-party
softwares on our free operating systems. The idea is to provide a
standard utility that could be called to tell the system/user that the
application that invoked it has a peticular need for some resource
(that could be a library for example).

So every ressource would have an unique identifier (why not the URL of
the web site, like XML namespaces). The utility (maybe we could call it
'require') would then prompt the user to tell him that the resource is
needed and he has to install it. It could also provide a button to
install directly using the distribution package manager.

So for example if I (a softare) need the png library, I could just call
the require utility this way:

	require http://libpng.org

And then either the libpng is available, require return true (status
0), or if it not available, it installs it and return true (status 0)
or if it can't install it or doesn't want to, it returns false (status
1)

We could also imagine to be able to ask where this resource can be
found in the filesystem with for exampel the call

	require http://libpng.org libfile

With libfile a value dependant of the resource (here
http://libpng.org). This cann would for example print
"/usr/lib/libpng.so".

That is goot for shell scripts, but for C programs we could also
imagine a library that would perform the same things.

What do you think of it ?

Thanks.

Mildred

-- 
Mildred Ki'lya
E-Mail:	mildred593(at)online.fr

Site:	<http://mildred632.free.fr/>
XMPP:	<mildred at jabber.fr> (GoogleTalk, Jabber)

GPG:	197C A7E6 645B 4299 6D37 684B 6F9D A8D6 [9A7D 2E2B]