> > > 2. I have basically the same question about how the installer was
> > > created.
> >
> > The installer was hand-written in C. It should be considered a work
> > in progress, and unless it gets completed, the project may eventually
> > end up switching to a plain old InstallShield setup program. The
> > intent of the current installer was to make it XP as well, porting it
> > to GTK and BeOS later. We have not gotten that far yet. Even the
> > Win32 version needs some work right now.
>
> In my opinion, UNIX doesn't need an installer and it would be more likely
> to lengthen the install process and confuse people. UNIX already has
> standard mechanisms for dealing with packages (deb,rpm,slp) and it it what
> people are most used to and best integrates with their existing
> installation (dependencies...).
That's kind of complicated, because Linux is not the only Unix out there.
I'll take Solaris as an example, mainly because that's the Unix version
I know the best. It's probably applicable (to some degree, at least) to
other systems.
Solaris (as in "Solaris[tm] operating environment") normally uses Sun's
packaging system. But some people use deb or rpm to install and manage
additional software packages. This means that you can't know which
packaging system manages GTK libraries and you can't know where they
are located. Solaris doesn't have anything like `ldconfig' utility,
which complicates things considerably. If the library is not located in
/usr/lib, run time linker will find it if the location was specified
with -R flag during the linking phase of the executable program or
LD_LIBRARY_PATH points to the appropriate directory at run time.
-R can't be used since you don't know the location of GTK library on a
target system. LD_LIBRARY_PATH will work, but it's an overkill. If
every program required it, that method would become unmanageable.
Most (all?) of commercial programs solve this problem by shipping their
own versions of every external utility or library that they need.
So I'm likely to get yet another version of Perl if the program requires
it, yet another version of Apache if it wants to serve something via
web interface and even yet another version of Java, although I have
the better one installed (and managed by Sun's packaging system)
in /usr/java. My immediate reaction to this kind of programs is
"What a bunch of losers." But, doing it right can be quite tricky.
AbiWord should bring GTK library with it, but it should be installed
only if it doesn't exist on a system. And the installer should try
to recognize as many packaging systems as possible. If there's more
than one, it should ask which packaging system should be used to
manage AbiWord. Then it should ask if an administrator wants it to
perform CDE integration (I absolutely hate programs which do this
without asking first). Then there might be other ways which are used
to make the application appear in a menu (or whatever) in other
desktop environments or window managers.
All this is far from simple and easy and some kind of installer
program is probably needed. Now, most of commercial Unix versions
have Motif bundled and that's probably the only graphics environment
on which one can count, before the installation is complete. Fortunately,
dtksh will exist on these systems, so the installer can be written
as a shell script. It's somewhat perverse to use Motif GUI to install
GTK applications, but I like that kind of perversions. :-)
Then there is a network installation. In this scenario you have one
server which has all read-only parts of applications which are served
via NFS to the workstations where people actually use them.
This is fairly important. As an illustartion, I have Sun's C, C++, Fortran
(77 and 90), Motif GUI builder and some other things. All in all,
those applications need about 540M of disk space. There's no way to
install them separately on each host where they should be available,
because there is no disk space, so they have to reside on NFS server.
But then, some programs need something in /etc (for example) on the
host on which they are running, so you'll have to have a separate
package for that. Again, installer program would be quite handy.
--
.-. .-. Life is a sexually transmitted disease.
(_ \ / _)
| dave@srce.hr
| dave@fly.cc.fer.hr