Sure thing, but one should know that RPM is all but a standard packaging system... Each distro has its own RPM quirks, so Mandrake won't be able to install Fedora RPMs, and so forth.

Thus, you'd have to push RPMs for all major RPM-based distros (Fedora, RHEL, SUSE, and Mandrake I guess) and also for several different versions of the latter (I know that, for Mandrake at least, RPMs are pushed for different versions, just look at Gaim!).

That would be great. Usually when I want to install something in Linux (Mandrake in my case) I check to see if there are any RPMs out there first as they're a lot easier to install for Linux n00bs like me. Use Gaim's list of supported distros as a starting point.

"Thus, you'd have to push RPMs for all major RPM-based distros "

Um, no. Pushing RPMs for one distro doesn't mean we have to push RPMs for all distros. I imagine we'd pick our favorite and ship for that. The others can wait for their distros to update or get builds from a 3rd party (or use our installer).

--Asa

Why not provide a .src.rpm as a first step? Then users (or distro packagers) have a starting point for creating the binary RPMs ("rpmbuild --rebuild"). BTW, I tried Thomas's method of packaging up a binary RPM for Fedora Core 2 (he only did it for FC1) and got one created, but when installed, the firefox binary just ran for a couple of seconds and exited (with no window created).

Pick a favourite distribution?

That'd be like building a road then only letting your favourite cars travel on it, ie basically begging for a juicy big flamewar.

The installer works. It's not the greatest (no integration with native package manager) but it'll do for now.

In future hopefully autopackage will have decent native package manager integration, it's high up the priority list, and at that point I'll be pimping it to you guys as a replacement/complement to the custom installer app. But right now it wouldn't offer much benefit as Moz doesn't have many hard dependencies.