Re: promoting good gnome apps via news.gnome.org

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Dave:

> I am against any Linux ISD (including ourselves) trying to provide a 
> one-size-fits-all installer, until a packaging system that allows that 
> comes along. I have high hopes for PackageKit, but in the meantime, your 
> goal should not be to give people installers, but to document installing 
> it on the most popular distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Fedora, 
> SuSe) with generic "apt-get" or "yum" instructions. Each distribution 
> has a distribution specific installer, that is what we should be targeting.

I have to say that I agree with you.  I know, for example, that Sun
Microsystems patches the upstream code in numerous ways to make the code
work on Solaris/OpenSolaris.  We work hard to get our patches upstream,
but there is usually a lag time and some modules are not well maintained
(we have patches in bugzilla for modules like libgnome and gnome-vfs
that have sat idle for years).

Providing an installer that provides builds that are not provided by
distro are bound to not have such needed patches and modifications, be
hard to support, and will likely not work well or as users expect.

Perhaps, instead of providing an installer, we could just point users
towards the correct resources to get the latest code from their distro
directly?  Or perhaps we could write a wrapper script that provides a
common interface for the various distro update systems?

Brian