Re: GNOME Install Wizard?

[james-gnome tainted org]

On Thu, Jun 24, 1999 at 10:24:30PM -0400, Jesse D. Sightler wrote:

> Question:  Have you ever used Debian and dselect?

Only once, and I was quite impressed.  I've never read the man pages
for it, or looked into what the code can do, so I only have a very
basic understanding of it.  I picked RPM only because I feel I have a
good enough understanding of it to mount a defense if needed. :)

> I basically agree.  Unfortuntely, RPM (at least pre-3.0, as I still
> haven't upgraded) tended to be stupid about not understanding the
> difference between shared libraries and programs.  IOW, barring just

An RPM package can depend on a specific version of a library.  I
believe when packaged (or at least prior to being extracted), the RPM
system does something like ldd(1) on the binaries to ensure that any
fundemental library dependencies are met.

RPM does have trouble when having both old and new versions of
libraries on the same system (glibc 2.0.7 and glibc 2.1.1 for example),
where the symlink to libc.so.6 can only point to one or the other.

> plain incompatible RPMs, rpm -Uvh ought to always fall-back to rpm -ivh

I'm not sure I understand (not that this is the place to go on at great
length about it), but rpm -Uvh will fallback to -ivh if the package
isn't installed.

> Um, cute, but NO!  :)  Should we also have a "dangerous rm" command?  Or
> hows about a "dangerous" fdisk command?  :)  If the user is intelligent

Heh, sorry, I got a little carried away but I think you catch my point.
A user should be made aware that using --force or --nodeps is only for
advanced users.   There used to be the understanding that "if you're
root, you must know what you're doing"; for whatever reason (good or
bad), that's no longer true - and needs to be delt with.

> Um, do you realize that what you've just described is *.deb in
> combination with dselect?  I just installed a debian 2.1 system with

Cool.:)  Maybe I should take a deeper look into this.   If Debian has
a method for doing it, (IMHO) Red Hat should look at what's available
and leverage it.

> AFAIK, debian already supports these pre-install and post-install
> scripts, and will even let you postpone the post-install indefinately,

RPM supports pre-install and post-install scripts too, however there's
no well defined mechanism for interacting with the package (abstracted
user interaction).

> If the distribution system were as slick as .deb, this wouldn't be
> necessary.  :)  Just give it the URL of package list, and select
> "Gnome-1.0-task" and it automagically makes everything work. 

There are benefits to both ways.  Your way an external app figures out
all of what is needed and goes and gets it all.   The "Packaged RPM"
idea, the file you have downloaded has all of the well understood
dependencies built into it.

> Well, ORBit came from GNOME, and it is not a Gnome specific project.  
> Why shouldn't this come about the same way?  HEheh, now that I think
> about it, CORBA bindings might be cool.  :)

There are groups focusing on how to install stuff on your system (the
freebsd pkg guys, the debian dselect guys, red hat's rpm guys), I think
our cycles would be better spent assisting their projects than creating
Yet Another Standard For Installing Stuff.

> Jesse D. Sightler


	JAmes