Re: Autoinstaller

[January Weiner 3 <jweiner1 ix urz uni-heidelberg de>]

> It think that's a good idea because the installation of a program still
> a big problem for beginners (dependencies, rights, ...).

"You are in a maze of twisty interdependent shared libraries, all
different...". No, I don't think *these* issues can be easily resolved by
an autoinstaller. Also, there is really no point in writing de novo rpm and
apt-get; rather, our ai (*a*uto *i*nstaller) should use the existing tools
whenever possible. I have no idea how to do that. A good solution would
require a profound knowledge of rpm / apt-get internals. A quick hack would
be to store a tar.gz (or .deb, which *is* a tgz archive) file in the
autoinstaller itself, and creation on-the-fly of an rpm, and then execution
of rpm -i foo-shmoo, intepretation of what rpm says, especially translating
"libfoobar.123.1234.235.34.3464.xadsf.foo.so.12831.123 missing" messages into
human language. It would be extremly important to use the rpm/deb packaging
mechanisms so as not to multiply the entia praeter necessitatem.

Another question: say, you download an rpm file. What do you do to install
it? I mean, in a GUI (personally, rpm -i is my friend). I know there are
GUI tools for that, I would just like to know which of them are actually
usable.

And the problem with execution rights remains. It's OK if the installer is
on a CD, because then the creator of the CD can easily set the execution
rights for the user. But I can't figure out how to make the installation
process via Internet as simple as downloading a file and clicking on it.

Cheers,
j.

----)-\//-///-----------------------------------January-Weiner-3-------
I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed. [Marvin]