Comment 15 for bug 160375

I guess I need to reiterate: determining a user's distro and invoking their package manager is a NON-TRIVIAL task to do programmatically. Non-trivial means that it's difficult to do. Packagekit is attempting to get this right, and it would be nice to use it so we don't have to have this discussion anymore, but it's still in development and not all (major) package managers are supported yet.

I should note that Awn has never been one that is very "backwards compatible", or any sort of "compatible", for that matter. It's taken me at least nine months to get desktop-agnostic to even be considered to be merged into trunk, and there's still some resistance. Additionally, Awn 0.3 (AKA Neil's work) will require the latest version of Gtk+, which will mean that a number of distro versions will be dropped (e.g., anything behind hardy, probably lenny+1, and F9).