Managing GNOME shell extensions [LWN.net]

Managing GNOME shell extensions

Posted Sep 22, 2011 19:53 UTC (Thu) by Corkscrew (subscriber, #65853)
In reply to: Managing GNOME shell extensions by epa
Parent article: Managing GNOME shell extensions

I've always wondered why this is. Has anyone previously tried to add single-user install to the apt? What was the community response?

I realise that Debian is more aimed at big iron, but even there it could be useful. I have webspace and shell on a Debian server, and it is truly painful to do stuff like install Django from source. It would be nice to just have a command like "apt-get install --single-user django" and let magic happen.

Off the top of my head, obvious issues are:
- dependencies would have to be trackable on a per-user basis (which would also mean unprivileged users getting access to the system-wide dependency db)
- you'd need separate locations for system-wide vs per-user installation for every package (this would break some of them)
- per-user installations would have to be convertible to system-wide installations as and when the sysadmin got round to installing stuff

None of these seem insurmountable.

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Managing GNOME shell extensions

Posted Sep 23, 2011 2:07 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

I agree! This would be truly useful.

I'd hope the system would allow users to have their own dependency dbs layered on top of the system's. That way I could add (say) TenGen's MongoDB or Caffeine to my apt sources without affecting everyone on the system.

Packages would probably have to have some sort of indication that user-installable or not. It doesn't make sense to install the kernel into your home directory. Probably x.org too.

It might get weird if the user does a dist-upgrade before the machine admin. Or, if your idea of local installs automatically converting to system-wide ones works, then maybe everything just works.