Deprecating gdebi

[Konstantin]

Purpose of gdebi is to allow installing packages from a file. However, it's been 6 years since apt supported installation from a file¹. Let's make it easier on both maintainers and the people who have to install/use `gdebi` and then may need to search nuances, like passing options to dpkg.

As far as I read gdebi man page, its functional seems fully covered by apt. The only thing I'm a bit in doubts about is the `root` option. But from my reading of docs, it seems that `gdebi --root=/foo myfile.deb` would be analogous to `apt install -o Dpkg::Options::="--root=/foo" ./myfile.deb`.

So, my suggesttion: installing gdebi on currently supported releases should print a deprecation notice that explains how a user can install local files with `apt` instead. Then eventually remove gdebi from repositories.

I tried contacting maintainers of gdebi to ask whether it's worth adding a deprecation notice, but haven't found any ways to do that, and so I went straight to creating a report here.

1: https://mvogt.wordpress.com/2015/11/30/apt-1-1-released/

[Coeur Noir (coeur-noir)]

Are you suggesting an only CLI path to install .deb ?

Ok, nowadays right click on a .deb might open gnome-software and the likes but those « stores » are much heavier to run and somehow less informative regarding the action of installing just one .deb ( missing dependencies… )

gdebi is / was a graphical enough utility for that purpose, but… see picture attached.

[Konstantin (hi-angel-z)]

Oh, wait, so are you saying gdebi contains a graphical interface?? Sorry, I never knew that. I used to only ever seeing suggestions about gdebi in the context of command line usage. That kind of changes everything. Yeah, sure, in this case it would make sense to keep gdebi in the repo.

I'll close the bug in this case.

> gdebi is / was a graphical enough utility for that purpose, but… see picture attached.

That's sad indeed. I think that deserves a separate bugreport though.

[Coeur Noir (coeur-noir)]

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gdebi/+bug/1524053 ?