The first time i downloaded Hardy Heron, it was using a torrent client in an internet cafe. I then copied the iso on to my usb drive, came home, burned and installed.

At which point i was dead in the water. I had no net connection at the time and therefore could not access the wealth of the repositories.

my idea is a portable extension of synaptic. Installable on any usb drive or external drive:
I install Ubuntu but i have no net access. I plug in my usb drive and open synaptic which now has a feature to Install an executable version of synaptic on my usb drive with my relevant system information.
I then take my usb key to any net cafe plug in my drive, Launch portable Synaptic, connect to the repositories and download and cache my desired programs on my usb drive.

I then take my drive back home, plug it in and open synaptic which then can sync with my usb drive and install my programs.

With a tool like this users can maintain an up-to-date system even where an internet connection is not readily available or affordable. It would also be infinitely more flexible than an entire repository on dvd, although i find that these are also great ideas.

I propose adding a feature to apt-get/aptitude/Adept/Synaptic to install software from a Bazaar branch on Launchpad.

Perhaps something like "aptitude install lp:inkscape", which would download everything from the branch, look for a standard "debian" folder, build the packages, and install normally from there on out.

It would provide a way for users to painlessly (ignoring incompatibilities between packages and such) install the bleeding-edge version of one or more applications.

Ubuntu should maintain a website repository, similar to getdeb.net, with debian packages of latest versions of some relevant Ubuntu packages and other software. Getdeb.net is very good but the software and package offer on this website is limited.

Providing access to the latest versions of packages through a standard repository may lead users to inadvertently install unstable or undesired packages through Synaptic or apt-get. A simple website would allow users hungry for specific new software updates to access compatible programs without having to build from source.

You want Wine 1.1? nspluginwrapper 1.0? Songbird 0.6.1? You could get them on this website without having to add extra repositories.

I think a lot of problems arise when packages installed by building from source coexist with other versions of the same packages installed from debs. What drives people to build from source is the unavailability of most recent versions in the repos.

NOTE: The debian sid/experimental repos are poorly described and documented, are not specific to Ubuntu and many packages are not updated. See the three examples I gave above.

Currently we have a number of repositories maintained for ubuntu or other linux distros. This is good in the way that users don't usually have to google for the software they need. However some of the software doesn't make it into the repositories, and there is no way for an application developer to reach the users other than put their software on the web and hope that users will find it through google. Another drawback of this approach is that there are requests to put software into the repositories. And yet another drawback is that it takes a little more time for a newer version of the software to make it into the repository. All of these problems can (at least partially) be solved by using a distributed repository approach. In this case there can be a central directory which will only need to contain some metainformation: where the packages are, how to download them, their checksum, and maybe if they are secure (read: maintained by canonical)

there are other advantages to using this approach, however there also are some security issues that need to be solved before implementing this idea. One is that since anyone can publish to the central directory, an attacker can possibly publish a modified version of software which was developed by another author and already gained some popularity (e.g. Pidgin), that contains a back door.