From: Leif W <war...@us...> - 2005-08-25 21:12:05
|
Ahh well, my main aversion to going with MSI or CAB is that it's too much like the M$ way, too tightly knit to closed technologies. That stupid thing trips itself up all the time, IMO. :p No offense. I've had to clean up after some installer mistakes one too many times. Anyways, I'd just store the data of installed packages. I mean why not, if we went to all the touble to make a somewhat centralized and generalized definition of distribution version, categories, package versions, and so on, and store that locally, then the subset of installed versions would not be much more. All that is required for installation is to unarchive a tar.gz in the right directory. I do not know if there are any registry changes that need to be made. As far as I'm aware, there is not, but that's not saying much, as I could simply be unaware. ;-) Also, the maintainers of other stuff may like the simplicity of making a simple archive. Any installer stuff, we wory only in the "distribution group", not in the "development group", to make a distinction of the clear divide. My philosophy, if I bring something into existence I want it to be as easy to maintain as I can, so I can fulfil the committment to maintain it, or at least leave it behind with documentation so others could pick up where it was left off, and not impose anything on anyone else by its existence, and neither store nor transmit redundant data. There's also those out there who really hate any mention of package managers, which is what we're discussing here (within the context of distribution). I totally respect that view and anything implemented needs to be thought of as an independent layer, there if desired to be used, or totally ignored and unused for those who might prefer to write a simple bat file to pull and unarchive all their files. :D Well, if there's not something already in there, I'd like to condense the main points of the distribution discussion into some sort of Wiki tutorial, so the next time it's brought up, I can point there, and make addendums to any new ideas. I seem to be able to write better than code at the moment, so at least I could contribute that much, for whatever it's worth. I'm also looking at both NSIS and Wix tools, to see what they can do, or how any of the ideas might be implemented, to better understand the feasability of ideas with the readibly available (free) tools. Maybe someone with skill and time can find inspiration to take the ideas and make something of it. :-) Leif |