alien, packaging, etc. Re: Simplifying package installation.
- From: Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>
- To: Derek Simkowiak <dereks kd-dev com>
- cc: bob cs csoft net, Justin Maurer <justin slashdot org>, Alan Cox <alan redhat com>, Miguel de Icaza <miguel gnu org>, gnome-hackers nuclecu unam mx, gnome-devel-list gnome org
- Subject: alien, packaging, etc. Re: Simplifying package installation.
- Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 20:54:40 -0400 (EDT)
Hi,
Some thoughts:
- A huge Linux ease-of-use advantage is that you can't really break
your system if you use the package management tools (well, unless
you use --force-depends or --nodeps, and then you are just silly).
Many, many Windows users have a giant mess of files they can't safely
delete, that don't have the right libraries, etc. That contributes
to the legendary Windows instability; a clean Windows system or
one with just Office is relatively stable.
Package management - deb or RPM - solves this problem. I think if
we break this nice Linux advantage, we will be dumbasses. People
should be encouraged to use the package system.
Sure, unstable software won't be packaged yet; but if users need this
EZ package tool, they shouldn't be using unstable software.
- Alien is broken; the problem it tries to solve is computationally
intractable and requires human judgment. It should never be used
at all. It's only marginally better than installing a tarball into
package-managed filesystem space.
- It follows that packaging software in a user-friendly way is a
distribution's task, and if we want to fix this we should write
nice tools for RPM and deb.
- Nonetheless ISVs can't realistically stick to package management
because they can't guarantee anything about the target system.
So if we have a nice setup for them, it would be a good thing;
they want to ship a "standalone" product.
However, I think some companies (Zenguin?) are working on this.
FWIW,
Havoc
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