Christopher Faylor wrote:
I'm not as concerned about the package management as I am about the UI, actually. If we don't have a good UI for initial install, then the initial user experience is still going to be painful.
You may want to take a look at my pre-release RPM "distribution" I did back in July 2001. Although dated, the U/I looks like a native Win32 app; I used Tcl/Tk to write the installer logic and the GUI. IIRC, the entire installer was around 200-300 lines of Tcl. (I can post the CD .iso if you want to download it.)
FWIW, I agree with with Warren Young; the next installer should be written in a scripting language. Besides the source line count that Warren mentions, the other benefit of using a scripting language is that it allows casual programmers (i.e. those with little or no Cygwin or Win32 programming experience under their belt) to make changes and bugfixes easily, with little to no handholding. A compiled program does not provide the same benefit.
-- D.