Re: Simplifying package installation.

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Thu, Aug 26, 1999 at 09:41:28AM -0500, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> 
>    Last night, Arturo and I were discussing an endemic problem in
> Unix: it is very hard for an end-user to install new applications in
> Unix.  
> 
>    Typically, if a user wants to install a package, they need to get
> root privileges to install it.  Yes, RPM helps a lot in this
> situation, but it does not address the very very end user problem.
> 
>    So it ocurred to me, that we could follow the Nextstep way of doing
> things for this.  Application providers could just ship a directory,
> say "Gnumeric.App", and all the files required to run Gnumeric: its
> data files, its modules, the executable and everything else is inside
> this directory.
> 
>    A shell script called run would be in there: Gnumeric.App/run and
> it would make sure all environment variables are properly setup.  A
> Gnumeric.App/dep-libs file could point to the dependencies of the
> application.
> 
>    The file manager would know how to execute those.
> 
>    Now, why is this better?  Because a user only needs to download the
> Gnumeric.App.tar.gz and put it on its home directory, we could then
> take care of launching it correctly, with no root involved in the
> process. 

Yes, this is good. It was actually suggested a long time ago too by some
nextstep freaks.

However just a tarball is not AS great, as it doesn't register with any
"application database", for better package managment.

Maybe rpm should support a per-user package list, and if a package supported
installing into user only enviroment, the user could do so.

The user package would add it's icon to the user menu ("Favorites" nowdays)
and maybe a link to the ~/bin/ so that the user can run it from command line

George

-- 
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George Lebl <jirka@5z.com> http://www.5z.com/jirka/
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