Comment 9 for bug 160375

"""
I think a ubuntu-centric approach is incorrect. If this is done it needs to not make any assumptions about the distribution in question.
"""

That's not what I meant. I meant in general that awn will be, as time goes on, more and more often installed by package manager, by apt:// urls, or from rpm and deb sites, but not by our wiki. I don't propose anything special about ubuntu. It applies equally well to anyone on fedora or suse or debian or slackware or whatever other distro decides that AWN is ready for their repo. As soon as that happen, the infrastructure our project has created (forum, launchpad, wiki) is bypassed because installation and basic use does not require it.

Currently AWN Forum goes right to the Animation World Network's forum and AWN Wiki points to wikipedia disambiguation, then the old wiki, and then the new one. While ubuntuforums, or the fedora forums, or forums for any other distro do not have to be looked for. Hardy was an example, not a particular reliance on ubuntu or any other distro.

"""
"Worst case, its possible to do a cursory check of whether apt-get is installed."

Once again... debian-centric.
"""

Well, its a valid enough heuristic, and again, its nearly impossible to do exactly. In any case, at least there is the possibility of doing something more, as opposed to there being no such possibility. You can also do a search for Yum and guess at fedora, a search for... you get the idea. and make the text:

It seems you're using Ubuntu. If that is the case, please install the package python-feedparser.
[+] More distros

And the more distros expands to a list of all distros.

BTW, I use ubuntu in all the examples since I know the correct package names for it. Replacing all references to ubuntu with fedora, debian, slackware, gentoo, or others wouldn't change much.

"""
I more or less believe the hardy user argument is fallacious. I assume when the applets get packaged for hardy the dependencies will be done properly so that they are pulled in by the package manager when they install the applets. Assuming the packagers do things correctly (Hi gilir!) this python dependency checking will only be triggered when someone installs with a non-distribution approved method... in which case they should be pointed to the wiki.
"""

Soon as its in the repos, there will be more applets using it for two reasons:

1) Its easier to install awn, so more people are using it.
2) There is a fairly stable API that can be relied on - the one most distros are using.
Since Ubuntu and Fedora, which are the biggest distros (so I have heard) release within months of each other, there shouldn't be aversion change between and so a LOT of people are using the same AWN version (since the distros will go with the stable version, I'm guessing.)

And these applets will be installed not through the package manager, (I'm sure the packagers will do a wonderful job) but through gnome-look.org and such. Thus, dependancies will be out of our hands. Plus, these developers may also not have heard about the wiki (as guides based on other guides of AWN applets start sprouting up on the internet) and so may not update it for their applet.