Re: [Syllable-developer] Syllable installation system white paper

[Turki Al-M. <tur...@gm...>]

On 9/18/06, Vandervliet, Kristian <Kri...@an...> wrote:
> Turki Al-Marri wrote:
> > I've arranged a white paper about Syllable installation system:
> > http://www.geocities.com/tigenius/SIS.html
> >
> > Please read it thoroughly and reply.
> >
> > Criticism is more than welcome, because we want to get it
> > right from the first shot ;)
>
> I don't want to dampen your enthusiasm and your energy is great,
> but you're making a fundemental error: You've assumed Syllable needs
> some form of complex package management system.  You're coming at
> Syllable from a Linux viewpoint, so your assumption here makes some
> sort of sense, but it is misguided.

I posted it for a reason, to see what the other developers are
thinking. So this is not considered damping enthusiasm, it's
considered sharing ideas. I'm okay :)

And the only assumption I made is that the average user expect a
double-click-and-go type installation, so it make sense if the user
just downloaded the package and run it.

> Applications should not be complex enough to ever require the type
> of package management you propose.  Package managers do not belong
> on Syllable, because Syllable does not need them.

It's not made because of complex applications, it's made to have a
unified method of adding and more importantly removing applications.
For example an e-mail client may want to add an applet to check for
emails every x minutes at start up, what do you think would happen if
the user removed it with the current methods? The user will have to
dig in the scripts to remove the annoying error message caused by the
missing application.

>
> You also make some technical errors:
>
> o Any installation system that automatically ran a shell script as
>   the root user is a huge security hole: there is nothing to stop
>   a malicious developer including "rm -rf /" or something equally
>   henious in a script.

That's so true. Maybe we should a user that have access to the
necessary folders only, but when installing a driver root is
necessary.

By the way, there is no system I know that don't have this security
hole. Even *nix.

> o ZIP is used on Syllable for a very specific reason.  As far as I
>   am aware, 7zip would be unsuitable for general use on Syllable
>   because it can not store attribute data.

I wanted to use a format that I'm sure that it is 100% patent free.
But if zip is patent free then there is no reason not to use it.

> BUT! it isn't all bad.  Your "description" file may have some merit,
> in a different role.  An *optional* description file inside a package,
> which could be easily read and parsed before the package is installed
> could have some uses E.g. if we had an online repository for software
> it would be possible to extract and display the description
> information of any package that was uploaded (Aminet for Syllable!)
>
> --
> Vanders
> http://www.syllable.org
> http://www.liqwyd.com
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