[Mono-devel-list] Looking for people to do Mono/autopackage integration

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> They look every bit as professional and clean as a commercial MacOS 
> software site, but when you click the "Download $COOL_APP" link you get 
> a tarball!

For those programs that do not require native libraries, we could
probably generate a Mono-based installer that can use console or
Windows.Forms based installations.

There is really nothing stopping us from building a Mono installer for
applications that can be relocated, the challenges I think are:

	* Write the code that installs software: should this be
	  an executable program, or should it be a package format 
	  with a special extension that a "minstall" command can
	  process?

	* Applications that use this process should probably follow
	  the Application Guidelines, but take things a step further:
	  be completely relocatable and break with the Unix tradition
	  of prefixed-based configurations.

	  I would go as far as advocating the creation of a standard
 	  to create OSX-like bundles for Linux and encourage the
	  various desktop efforts to include support for bundles.

The first addresses software that requires it to be adapted to the
target system, register itself somewhere or modify some system files;  

The second is for fully self contained software.

A prototype should not take longer than a day.

Miguel