Re: New idea (was: Re: Package managment idea...)

[Havoc Pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On Sat, 26 Dec 1998, Jason Nordwick wrote:
> I had an idea in the shower today:  What it each Gnome compliant program
> also
> shipped with a binary/script called <prog>-gnome-init.  This might just be a
> link to the binary that inspects argv[0], but could be seperate.  On startup
> of Gnome, it would look for all *-gnome-init executables in its path and
> execute them.  They could then add whatever icons are needed to the desktop,
> start-menu, blah, blah, blah.
>

The problem is that users will start Gnome, but root needs to do this
stuff. The superuser-user distinction is one of those fundamental
differences between Unix-like systems and Windows/Mac that makes us have
to do things differently.

(although on a single-user box, we can often pop up a "give root password"
dialog, then continue in a windows/mac way - no one has implemented this
properly yet, however - big security issues so it's complicated.)
 
It might be made to work, I don't know. It's kind of superfluous on a
system with decent packages though, so I'm not sure there will be much
interest. Maybe so.
 
> platform specific.  It has sort of a two level method.  First, it relies on
> the programs own configuration system (such as GNU Configure), second it
> applies appropriate patches for FreeBSD systems that the configure scripts
> may have missed or that provide better performace (such as madvise).  These
> patch scripts are getting more obviated as people get better at building
> cross platform code.  Dependency information is coded by the person who
> setup the port.  What a port basically does is compile a package, then use
> pkg_add to add it to the system.
>

This is just an uncompiled package, not an untouched tarball.  That's all
I'm saying. You can't have a tool that handles arbitrary .tar.gz files off
the net. You have to have complex, standards-compliant packages. 

> I agree that a packaging system is beyond the scope of Gnome, but just an
> FYI, there is a X-capable/CLI prompting system distributed on all FreeBSD

We have a thingy like this in gnome-utils, 'dialog.' Have a look. I'm not
sure it's working this minute but it could be made to again.

Havoc