By the way, what I meant in the introduction, is that .deb is unpratical for distributing packages with dependancies not present in the official repositories.

Also, keep in mind we’re talking about end users, that may not know shell commands like dpkg. Not that command line is bad, but it’s outside the domain we’re discussing about.

Should an end user mess with command line just to get the latest and greatest version of a software ? Sure that may be less stable, but the opposite may be true, and important bugfixes may be included.

Your opinion has been greatly appreciated !

What I do when I install the latest version of Pidgin is just to put all the .debs in a folder then run dpkg -i *.deb in that folder. That seems to work perfectly. Also, if I download a .deb package that requires more packages to be installed, a dpkg -i run with that .deb as the argument will mostly result in a corrupt (unconfigured) installation, but nothing that can’t be fixed with a quick aptitude install -f, and then select a solution that resolves the dependency problem by installing more software instead of removing the one that was just installed (usually the second solution presented).

Piece o’ cake!

Sure it’s a problem, but I believe it’s overcomeable in a way or another.

From a different point of view, I think that adding a repository with a .deb is an hack itself, so I believe that’s the reason of the need of extending apt-url.

Sadly I can’t help you with that, having never tried to do it myself.

I’m with you on the separate file, interestingly the GUI adds on the sources.list file, that’s why I stuck with that in the command line example.

On a separate note, I regreted having wrote such a lenghty introduction, as it only distracts from what it’s pointed out from rest on the post.

If that is the case, why is this apt-url support for repositories such a big issue?

Can you send me some pointers on how is this done? I tried doing this in the past and got 90% of the way (putting the repository file into sources.list.d and also importing the key). I got stuck with reloading the package information (apt-get update), not really possible from a post-install script (at least I could not figure it out).

Playdeb, from what I can tell, is not really doing this. It firsts asks you to install a custom version of apturl, and then a separate install for the repo (but no key and no reload). So it is a major hack.

And I think adding a separate file to sources.list.d is much better than editing sources.lists IMO.

@Jorge: That really make sense in the case of a repository containing packages not includeable in Ubuntu official repositories. What I am missing myself it’s the reason why only those kind of repositories will be accepted for whitelisting.