Comments on: Ubuntu and aptURL

By: Alan Lord

Alan Lord — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 18:52:17 +0000

@Scott.

Yes I was thinking about Guillaume’s comment some more. It is a bit of an issue right now, and I can see why they have disabled PPA support for the time being.

I could see this being *really* useful in say a corporate environment where you control your own repos. I could imagine a company wide Wiki type scenario where there are links for useful programs, diagnostic tools etc so users could help themselves more…

Anyway, thanks again for commenting. Always nice to have a dialogue.

By: Scott Wegner

Scott Wegner — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 18:31:52 +0000

@Alan: Ahh, so it does say that. I must’ve glanced over it in my excitement. I understand the security issues behind PPA’s, although I hope that in the future there will be work to mitigate the problems.

I know, for example, that the Launchpad team is working on having signed packages in their hosted PPA’s. Then, users can at least demonstrate “trust” in a PPA by conditionally adding the signature file. Down the road, perhaps the community could come up with a set of “trusted” PPAs which are routinely verified. But then, I suppose this would probably have issues as well.

I’m straying from the point– apturl is still great!

By: Alan Lord

Alan Lord — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:46:49 +0000

@Scott, please note the comment in the manual that says “Warning: This is currently disabled because of security concerns.”

@Guillaume, thanks. Your comment makes a lot of a sense.

By: Guillaume Muller

Guillaume Muller — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:43:11 +0000

And unfortunately, let me remind you that clic-installing is very dangerous from the point of view of security… If such a thing comes to be used widely, then we will have the same problems under linux than those that exists under windows: virii, malwares, spywares, and their use to flood my mailbox with spam :{

By: Scott Wegner

Scott Wegner — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 18:06:58 +0000

Ahh, very cool! I was aware the aptUrl links previously, but I didn’t know about it’s advanced syntax. Specifying the PPA is very useful, as I have seen many tutorials which first require adding a PPA to the sources.list. Bonus points because it will ask the user whether to remove the PPA afterwards.