Ubuntu Wiki

The Problem

Currently, there's no easy way to install packages that have been downloaded from the web. The only way to install no-repository packages is dpkg -i with manual dependency resolution. This is not very userfriendly and does not encourage 3rd party development for Ubuntu.

The Solution

Michael Vogt has hacked together a prototype called Gdebi. The source is available via bazaar-ng (bzr) at http://people.ubuntu.com/~mvo/bzr/gdebi--main. Debs are available at http://people.ubuntu.com/~mvo/gdebi.

My idea would be to inspect the deb file and extract the control information and parse the Depends/PreDepends/Conflicts line. Now use libapt to figure if these dependencies can be satified and if so, install them. Then dpkg -i is called. This way it will never produce a broken cache but still make install local debs easy and painless (with information how many additonal packages needs to be installed). And no need to modify apt/synaptic/sources.list. [..]