19 Jan
1999
19 Jan
'99
5:12 a.m.
> > Over 90% of the time, installing something
on this linux machine (which
> > is anything but standard) consists of unpacking the tar archive and
> > typing make. That's it. No fiddling about, it just compiles and installs.
> > Sometimes there's a configuration script to run, but that's no real
problem
> He said the word, there it is again .... COMPILE.
Sure. The point is that typing 'make', for all
it runs a compiler, does
not require any programming knowledge.
TBD.
How would an enduser tell the difference between a
Windows installation
program that copies files to the right places and modifies some
configuration files, and a linux one that copies some files to the right
places, modifies some configuration files and runs make to build the
binaries from the C source. It doesn't require _any_ more knowledge.
If the installation does this all for me, without any problems
(like different header files, unimportent, but ill behavied defines
or a different compiler version - not to mention different libc's)
_and_ without any unnecersary interacion (like start the package manager,
change directory, change environment settings, change script files,
start 3 make runs, change /stc/* setings, etc.), I'm completly fine
with that, but in fact, I never had the luck - I _can't_ remember
any situation where I installed a source level package in an unix
environment without these tasks. One could send Windows to hell,
but installation of (most) user apps is end user friendly - start
the installer (or just insert a CD with autostart), click install,
_maybe_ change the proposed installation directory, and that's it.
x86 Linux, with it's huge binary support is the only Unix like
system I know that comes close to that - and if the KDE will
advance, they might peer with windows at this.
Don't get me wrong, of course I dig thru any .conf file I can find,
just to see how it's don (if no other reason is available), but thats
not what I'm talking about.
I want to download a package and just start RPM and _maybe_ answer
if I want to run the installed soft now, or wait... Of course to do
this, a System has to be more defined/standardized than most unixes
are, but x86 Linux is setting these (needed) standards defacto (maybe
a user has to check for the right version for his distribution, but
even this can be handled - some good packages already check and apply
acording if a SuSE or RedHat is found).
Gruss
H.
--
Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut
HRK