On Thu, Aug 26, 1999 at 02:13:59AM +0200, Sami Dalouche wrote:
> I would like to know if there's a possibility with apt (or something else)
> to do the same that windows/Office 2000.
> It installs automaticly new software from the CD when you want to start a
> non-installed function.
It would have to be far wider reaching than just apt. You would need to
work out some way to hook into all the various ways there are of running
programs - shells, menus within X, the lot.
One similar idea that's been tried before is to have a live CD which
gets cached onto the hard disk. I believe it was Linux-FT that did
this. AFAIK the hard disk had a perfectly standard filesystem on it,
but there was a glue layer on top which held it together with the CD.
When something was read from the CD it got copied onto the hard disk, so
you could modify things and so on. I don't think there was any expiry
of old things or anything like that - in a sense it was just piecemeal
installation of the system.
Coda and AFS may be able to work something like this.
> It could be great if under Debian, when we type a command that don't exist,
> it would automaticly search the command from a small APT database or from the internet if diald|direct connection is here.
> And we could specify in a conffile to download the software or to install
> directly from the CD.
> Wouldn't it be cool ? Is it possible to program ?
It's possible, but I have to say that it's a feature I would run
screaming from. It's completely unsuitable for multi-user machines
(think of the DoS potential, unless one has enough disk space to install
the entire distribution), and could be extremely annoying - imagine
mistyping a command and installing a package. You'd also need to decide
how to handle things like alternatives and name collisions, not to
mention how maintainer script configuration would be handled.
--
Mark Brown mailto:broonie@tardis.ed.ac.uk (Trying to avoid grumpiness)
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~broonie/
EUFS http://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/filmsoc/
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