joyride 2128 smoketest

[Michael Stone]

> We already ship one on the laptop (yum)!  Perhaps we could be using it
> to handle our activity updates?  If the problem is that yum is slow and
> awful, then maybe we need to start thinking about using apt.

Here are several problems you might think about:

1) We'd like people to be able to package activities on a wide variety
of systems including on Windows. To the best of my knowledge, it
currently requires nontrivial Unix expertise to produce most Unix
packaging formats.

2) We'd like people to be able to install activities with relatively low
privilege -- in particular, without root privilege. Linux packaging
formats and guidelines often assume that the person installing packages
has access to root authority (or is able to do something comparable like
chroot + fakeroot). What can we do about this? For example:

  * RPM supports relocation and (for some packages) installation as an
    unprivileged user. However, privilege is needed in order to update
    the system rpm database. Perhaps we could teach RPM how to maintain
    two databases; one privileged and one not?

  * Alternately, we could imagine running activities in a copy-on-write
    (CoW) filesystem (union-mounted, FUSE, vserver, ...) with either a
    false sense of privilege (fakeroot) or a restricted form of real
    privilege (vserver, selinux, ...). Then we could install packages
    for activities which need them with relatively little hassle. 
         
      - How could we share disk usage costs between such activities?

      - Could we ever update the packages inside these containers?

Regards,

Michael