[Lazarus] An online package manager

[Juha Manninen]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 8:52 AM, Aradeonas <aradeonas at operamail.com> wrote:
> Im agree with Luiz,Its better to have them in a server as a pack,

No, Luiz suggested the opposite, to download from SCM directly without
any packs.
I don't know why people are obsessed with SCM tools for a feature that
does not need them and certainly should not depend on them.

> because as you (Juha) said we dont want do any force dependency on
> anything like Git or Github so we can cache the packages in a server as a zip
> [...]

Dependency on Github web site / service is OK.
Dependency on Git tool for all Lazarus users in a no-go.

In fact I like the FreeBSD ports system. Does it depend on SCM tools
or does it download some ready made Zip packages from GitHub and other
sites?
Both ways have a problem : It is easy to get only the latest version
of a package. Projects can depend on old versions, too.

Anyway we should add support for different download sites for the
Lazarus packages, in the spirit of FreeBSD ports.
Maybe like this :

Phase 1 :
Support zipped meta-packages but allow to download them from any URL
(HTTP or FTP).
The difference to Kostas' minimal design is that the Lazarus .lpk
files are not needed separately. The client can extract them and check
dependencies. Having dependency info in other places would be
duplicate info.
A list of available packages must be in one file. Doing a FTP
directory listing eats resources.
Note: no server side SW is needed.

Phase 2 :
Support also downloading from sites hosting code (SF, GitHub etc.)
when they provide direct download.
Using the SCM tools directly cannot be supported because we cannot
impose such a dependency for the cross-platform Lazarus.
Still no server side SW is needed.

Phase 3 :
Support user rating and comments for packages.
Support using the SCM tools from server. When a download URL refers to
a SCM repo, the server SW loads the sources and zips a meta-package.
Clients can use that package directly.
Server side SW is needed obviously.

Juha