From: Rui Miguel Seabra (rms@1407.org)
Date: Tue Jun 24 2003 - 10:18:57 EDT
On Tue, 2003-06-24 at 12:56, Alan Horkan wrote:
> > I'm not interested at all in making a RPM spec for GNUMERIC+ABIWORD
> > (that would be really dumb, package-unwise and Microsoft-like).
>
> You might think it is dumb but that is the whole point.
> It is not trying to be smart it is trying to be convenient.
> Microsoft understands this, there are some things they actually do right.
This is, quite frankly, not one of them. Microsoft does not know the
concept of package. However, than can be accomplished with an installer
that wraps around the packaging system.
> > What could probably be done is a zenity-sized shell program that would
> > fetch official RPMS from the web sites and them rpm -ivh or dpkg-install
> > (or whatever) but I'm not sure if I could handle it or if doing it this
> > way would be a good idea.
>
> This wouldn't be a whole lot of use to me in the situation I have in mind
> but it would be sweet to be able to:
> apt-get gnome-office
I'm not sure how apt-get works, but does it have groups?
Like, you will not say: apt-get
*spaceseparatedlistofeverysinglegnomepackage* but probably something
like apt-get "aliasThatDependsOnGnomePackages".
If that's so, than it should be easy to just do:
apt-get gnome-office
and then abiword would be installed, gnumeric would be installed etc...
etc... and the would would still be a sane place.
> I have the use of a fast connection but not on my home machine. It is
> very useful to be able to download one single package and then go home
> and install it without having to worry about a whole lot of missed
> dependencies and suchlike.
> I hope you can understand that for many users time and convenience is more
> important than a little extra bandwidth or disk space.
What you describe is something that easily done with the current apt-get
system without making the monstruosity that one .deb with
gnumeric+abiword+deps+whatnot.
The same goes for rpm with apt4rpm or similar packaging systems.
What you describe is a _hell_ that is derived from trying to simplify
what's already simple.
What's the difference between:
cd /mnt/zip ; rpm -ivh gnome-office-monster.rpm
and
cd /mnt/zip ; rpm -ivh gnome-office/*rpm
?
Possible answers: no packaging hell (specially on dependencies).
typing less characters, etc...
If one is dumb enough to install software "package by package" than one
probably doesn't even install anything that doesn't come with the
distribution.
There are reasons why GNU/Linux systems usually come with packaging
systems and shared libraries.
Because it works better than not having them is one of those.
Rui
-- + No matter how much you do, you never do enough -- unknown + Whatever you do will be insignificant, | but it is very important that you do it -- Gandhi + So let's do it...?Please AVOID sending me WORD, EXCEL or POWERPOINT attachments. See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
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