Indeed, glad someone else is interested in this. I saw the very same feature in Android and in the old GTK+ version of mbarcode, wrote the QR code plugin so that it could accept either an entire .install file encoded as a QR code barcode (but those were then pretty large) or just the url to a .deb/.install file which is (theoretically, and at least did work iirc) automatically handed over to the relevant program to be downloaded and handled.

Anyway I'm all for this, I guess that encoding a url or the name of a deb, rather than the entire .install file would be a better way of doing this, just as the QR code barcodes are then smaller.

I'm open to suggestions and opinions as to formats, etc.