It would be nice to see that the autopackage support files would be included in future FC releases, so that users could just install .package files without worry. Would that be possible?
Hi - thanks for the suggestion! Anything is possible, but autopackage doesn't appear to fit with the current thinking for Fedora Core, which uses rpm for its packaging system and most likely will continue to use rpm only. autopackage also doesn't look very mature. If you would like to have autopackage available for Fedora, an alternative may be to become the maintainer of an autopackage rpm in Fedora Extras, so that if someone does run across a .package file, they can retrieve and install autopackage easily.
Oh, but autopackage is not thought of as an alternative to RPM. Autopackage is meant to: 1. Allow users to install extra packages, whereas RPM seems to be more of a system management kind of program. 2. Allow developers to distribute programs in a distro-independent way. 3. Allow users to install packages without having root privileges (in ~/.local). Autopackage can also easily install its support files when the user encounters his/her first package, since the package has a shell script stub that can download it. That requires terminal access, however, so it would be easier for GUI-only users if the support files were already there. Thus, it's merely for user convenience that I'd like to see the autopackage support files installed by default, not as any kind of change to the system itself.