On Sun, Feb 09, 2020 at 11:47:18PM -0500, Olek Wojnar wrote: > 1) Perhaps surprisingly, I agree in principle that installing from an > external source should not be "encouraged" under normal circumstances. > > 2) However, this illustrates a use case that perhaps has not come up in > the past. As I explained in one of the bug reports against my packages, > the rationale for this was to provide a temporary alternate > functionality for end users while upstream goes through a period of > instability. > > 2a) Ideally, I would have preferred to remove the packages in > question from Debian and have a system that would have presented users > with options for alternate sources of that package. I may try to hack > something together for my packages because I agree with a comment on one > of those bugs that transitioning to an alternate package source should > not be done without explicit user action. > > 2b) In a general sense though, this seems like a mechanism that may > have value beyond these two packages. For example, would it be possible > for maintainers to list alternate sources of a package in a new field in > d/control? Then, if a package must be removed from Debian either > temporarily or permanently, users could be presented with alternate > options for that package. Or if certain users want the bleeding-edge > version they can easily get to it instead of pestering a maintainer to > package something that is not stable enough for Debian. > > 2c) The problem with saying a user could just install from > snap/flatpak/etc is that a user may not know what other options are out > there and may not know if they are authoritative (e.g. many but not all > packages are created by the upstream authors). What I am proposing > (well, more like thinking about at the moment, and looking for feedback) > is a system to create an equivalence between the official Debian package > and the same package in other systems. Does anyone else see value in > such a construct? > > > Another package manager in subject could be snap, flatpak, pip, nix, etc. > > > > [1] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cyphesis-cpp > > https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ember > > [2] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/snapd > > In summary, as snap/flatpak/etc increase in popularity I think it may be > a good idea to have a formalized method for Debian package maintainers > to designate authoritative equivalent sources for their packages, if > they wish to do so.
May not answer you question directly. There's something called software center. Like discover[1] for KDE plasma, gnome-software[2] for GNOME. Users can install either debian package, or flatpak, or snap apps. [1] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/plasma-discover [2] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gnome-software
