Re: Gnome/Linux Application Installer

["Jason Nordwick" <nordwick xcf berkeley edu>]

>On Wed, Dec 23, 1998 at 04:57:44PM -0700, Jason Nordwick wrote:
>> My concerns.
>>
>> 1. Gnome is not only GNU/Linux, what about the BSDs and other Free
systems?
>
>Agreed.. that's why the proposal I made is doable on all unicies. It's
>patterened after the nextstep solution which was done on BSD.
>

So, are you saying that GNOME should have it's own install seperate from the
normal installation software shipped on the machine already?

The two main impacts to my statement were that (1) the package system should
integrate with the system wide model and (2) it should look consistant with
the current system.

>If you don't agree with what I said above, consider that no amount of
>package system magic will fix the fact that applications in UNIX have
>no way (presently) to find out where they were installed. Until we fix
>the _applications_ (by fixing the standard libraries) package managers
>are helpless.
>

Just because an application does not know where it is installed, there will
always be these problems?  Yes, I see this as a small problem, but I think
that there is a jump in logic to saying that this problem will fail all
package systems.

I do agree that applications need to be fixed, but the fixes are not solely
technical, but also teaching people how to do things in a system independant
manner (e.g., I saw a program where in order to get the applications name,
instead of lookin at argv[0], it looked at /proc/<pid>/cmdline (or whatever
it is called) and parsed that, blah... But that is whole different argument
on the Linux gratiutous procfs).

There are a few groups working of different packages systems, I just think
that we should look at all the alternative before jumping to a current
broken model, which it seems that you do agree with me: current package
managers are broken).

-jay