[derefr]

What'd be really interesting is if MAS was rebuilt on top of a package manager. That'd solve both the lack of package management, and most of the MAS's woes. (In that you could probably just install MAS apps from the command line, and if nothing else, you could just build an alternate GUI around that.)

[masklinn]

> What'd be really interesting is if MAS was rebuilt on top of a package manager. That'd solve both the lack of package management, and most of the MAS's woes.

I don't see how it'd solve the primary MAS woes of horrible contributor/developer experience, uncaring maintainership and inflexible sandboxing.

[derefr]

> horrible contributor/developer experience, uncaring maintainership

I was imagining a package manager with the standard kind of "add whatever sources to your sources list you like" model, as most Linux distros have. If the MAS was rebuilt in terms of this, then presumably adding a custom package source would make custom apps (which, after all, are just packages) show up in the MAS app for selection as well, just as they'd show up in e.g. Ubuntu Software Center. Apple would only control their app/package source.

The interesting question is whether someone would be able to list an app in their third-party source as costing money—and, if so, how that would work, and where payment would go. Maybe each "source" could come with a payment processor token for the MAS client to interact with, additional APIs to let the MAS app grab payment receipts from your source server, etc. In other words, you'd be hosting less of a "package management repo" and more of a "store server with built-in package CDN"—but that's not too big of a change.

Now, I wouldn't expect Apple to actually go this far, but it'd be in line with their current philosophy on enterprise app distribution. Apple really really dislike third-party "app store" apps, third-party "updater" daemon apps, etc.; they would much rather build infrastructure to obviate your enterprise's horrible custom solution than try to have their CSRs understand and support it for you. I could see them building this thing if Microsoft, Adobe, etc. all bugged them to for long enough. And then you as an indie developer could take advantage of it by setting up a PPA-alike (and someone could create the equivalent of Launchpad to host yours and everyone else's.)

[toyg]

Maemo / MeeGo had what you talk about: a store built on top of apt. If I remember correctly, they managed it by adding (on package install through the store gui) package-specific repositories that required authentication. So you could keep using apt-get in the normal way from free repos, receive updates etc.

[curt15]

Aren't MAS apps distributed in a self-contained bundles? What package management is required?

[derefr]

Package management, to me, is mostly about the ability to have a list of sources (feeds of versioned signed package manifests); for updating to generate a merged manifest; and to install, uninstall, auto-upgrade-with-dependencies, and pin/unpin versions of the packages from that merged manifest.

OSX actually has softwareupdate(8), which does work like this—and which at least the OSX system updates (managed now through the MAS app) execute in terms of—which could theoretically be fed custom catalogs (sources) in addition to Apple's, to get most of this part of the benefit. Never heard of anyone doing that, though.