Ximian Red Carpet Beta Released

[ Thanks to Diego
Restrepo for the tip. ]

Announcing Red Carpet 0.9 Beta

You have waited frothingly in anticipation. You have endured a
perpetual release date of “two more weeks.” You may have, in a
senseless act of anxiety over this amazing work of art, even
whispered the “V”-word[1] under your breath. You have tormented the
developers on IRC. You have begun the chanting. You have burned
towns. You have seized ships and blockaded ports.

Red Carpet is here.

Red Carpet is the next generation Ximian updater and software
management application. Based around the concept of “channels”, or
content groupings, Red Carpet will be able to present you with a
virtually endless array of software for your GNU/Linux and Unix
systems. In addition to just updating packages already installed on
your system, Red Carpet allows you to install new software and
remove existing software. Red Carpet operates seamlessly with your
existing packaging tools on both RPM and dpkg-based systems, giving
you a consistent interface for managing your software on any Linux
distribution. And, with DepTricketyTrackTrackTronixTron 9000, our
amazing dependency and conflict resolution system, the nightmare of
dependencies all but vanish from your life. Rejoice.

We will now move into the question and answer section of our
release announcement:

Q. Is this a beta? 0.9? What’s going on here?
Where am I? Why am I wearing a clown wig?
A. With our best efforts we have tried to find
every bug, duplicate every dependency situation, become one with
both RPM and dpkg, and click on everything rapidly and repeatedly.
However, we are most ashamed to admit that we did not discover
every possible bug, could not duplicate all of the horrors that are
your packaging database, failed to achieve spiritual enlightenment,
and simply cannot click as fast as you can. As a result, we present
this application to you in beta form. Frankly, we want you to do
thangs to it. You find bugs, we’ll fix em.

Q. How do I get it?
A. Binary packages for Red Hat 6, Red Hat 7, and
Debian GNU/Linux systems are available now through the Red Carpet
mirror in the Ximian GNOME Updater. For Debian users, add this line
to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb
ftp://spidermonkey.ximian.com/pub/red-carpet/binary/debian-22-i386/
./

You can also get them, as well as the source tarball, from
ftp.ximian.com/pub/red-carpet.
Because we’re in the process of moving our office and we overwork
our build people, binary RPMs for the remainder of our supported
Linux distributions will be available a little later. Sorry.

Q. Okay, I’ve got it. Now what?
A. Give it a whirl. You can find Red Carpet from
the Programs->System menu on the foot launcher or on the top
menubar. After it downloads all of the channel bar, you should
probably verify that your system’s dependencies are fulfilled by
choosing “Verify Installed Packages” from the File menu. After
that, go buck wild. Subscribe to channels, install new software,
check out our totally l33t About page, whatever you want.

Q. “I found a bug” or “Red Carpet sucks! How do
I tell you how bad you suck?”
A. In the unlikely event that you find a bug,
please submit them to the Ximian bugzilla at http://bugzilla.ximian.com. We’ve
created a public mailing list, red-carpet@ximian.com, for you to
tell us exactly how much we suck. Or rule. We’re ready for it. We
can take it. You can subscribe to it at http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/red-carpet.
By the way, help control the pet population: have your pets spayed
or neutered.

Q. Tell me more about channels.
A. That’s not really a question, but I would be
happy to. With channels we are able to provide you with a much
wider variety of software and in a much cleaner way than what was
possible with our old updater technology. Channels can be
subscribed to selectively, meaning that you only ever receive
information on updates of software that interest you.

Q. So, uh, does that mean it’ll update my
distribution too?
A. Oh yeah. Red Carpet detects what distribution
you are running and presents a channel of it, with all of the
updates issed from the vendor. Red Carpet can install any software
on your system, as long as there’s a channel for it. In essence,
Red Carpet becomes the central point for installing, updating, and
managing software on your computer.

Q. What about package signing and
verification?
A. You’ll want to install GnuPG to verify package
signatures. We have included the public keys for Ximian, Red Hat,
Caldera, TurboLinux, Mandrake, and SuSE. Most distros provide them
these days. If you don’t have it, Red Carpet will still run
fine.

Q. Does this replace the Ximian GNOME
Updater?
A. Because this is a beta, we don’t want to
prevent people from updating their system in the event that it
breaks. As Red Carpet is an infinite improvement over the old
updater that we introduced in March 2000 in every way, it will
replace the Ximian GNOME Updater at some point in the future. In
the meantime, however, they should both work.

Q. You broke my Evolution snapshots. What the
hell?
A. Sorry bout that. It was necessary to eliminate
a pointless dependency on Red Carpet. Your Evolution will be broken
until you install new snapshots (which should be built tonight).
Look on the bright side, though, you’ll be able to install those
snapshots with Red Carpet! Sweet!

Q. Who worked on Red Carpet?
A. Red Carpet is the result of months of work by
the following people:

DEVELOPERS:
Ian Peters
Joe Shaw
Vladimir Vukicevic

CONTRIBUTORS:
Jacob Berkman

USER INTERFACE DESIGN:
Anna Dirks

ARTWORK:
Tuomas Kousmannen
Jakub Steiner

In addition, many thanks go out to Larry Ewing and Radek Doulik
for their work on GtkHTML, on which Red Carpet heavily relies.
They’ve had to deal with our constant pestering in addition to
those of the pesky Evolution developers. All too often our
conversations went like this:

“Dude, there is a bug in GtkHTML.”
“That isn’t a GtkHTML bug.”
“Yeah dude, it is.”
“Dude, no it isn’t.”
“Dude, it is.”
“No, dude, it isn’t.”
Pause.
“Hmm. You’re right, it isn’t. Sorry, dude.”
Thanks, guys. We’re dorks.

Lastly, special thanks go out to Matt Wilson, who, aside from
his help, plain and simply totally rules.

Q. How many inside jokes are in this release
announcement?
A. I quit counting around eight. Joe Shaw,
however, will give one hundred AMERICAN dollars to the first person
to identify all of them and their origins.

[1] Vapo(u)rware.