Activity and collection designers have gotten a lot of attention in recent days. Some of the heated discussions at FUDCon targeted the rpm v. xo debate — concluding among other things that content bundles and installation for non-technical users are regularly neglected by packaging systems (as root access is required for a lot of package work).
Numerous related projects were mentioned [CPAN, Ruby Gems, autopkg, Firefox extensions], and Michael Stone and C. Scott Ananian both got their licks in. At the same time, a recent discussion about “making activity designers happy” brought up other ways to simplify making and publishing activity bundles.
What are your own bundle stories? Have you plumbed the depths of Activities/All and come up wanting? Does the Software Updater do it for you?
I like the .xol collection format and the expandable Library home page as a way to download library content, I wonder if there’s a way to make it more standard.
Even without that, it seems the web server could just hand the same XOL bundle as a regular .zip to an ordinary browser, and let the user figure out where to stick the content and how to create a local bookmark.