In a message dated: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 14:16:03 EDT
Greg Kettmann said:
>I've a couple of questions (as usual), all related. I'm trying to find
>the best way to distribute a package to the greatest number of
>distribtutions.
Funny you should ask, as I just recently answered this question for another
vendor :)
Here's what I told them:
>I have been tasked with investigating installers under all of the
>flavors of Unix. <Vendor name deleted> is well versed on the Mac
>(InstallerVise) and Windows (InstallShield), but when it comes to
>Unix it seems there is no standard. I have seen the following out on the net:
>
>Perl script (no GUI)
>shell script (no GUI)
>Tcl/Tk script (GUI)
>Web Start Wizard - Java (GUI) - examples at http://www.sunfreeware.com
>Linux packages (no GUI)
>Solaris packages (sort of a GUI)
IMNSHO, a source tar-ball is the way to go, though I don't think
<Vendor name deleted> will go for that one :)
On Linux, I think the best bet is to create an RPM package for RedHat based
systems, and a "deb" package for Debian based systems.
Though, to keep your maintenance costs low, and "kill all birds with one stone"
it's probably easiest to provide a tar.gz archive of everything similar to
how they packaged the acrobat reader.
This is the *easiest* thing for Adobe to do, since it means the same packaging
process for all versions of Unix and Linux. However, this is completely
non-graphical (which IMO is a good thing), so it won't appeal to your normal,
non-techy type (though they're probably on Windows or a Mac anyway :)
If you really want to go graphical, I believe InstallShield has a Linux and a
Solaris port, they advertise in Linux Journal all the time, and I know Sun was
working with them to make Solaris installs better.
Additionally, at least for RedHat based systems, there are GUI based rpm
installers. If you package your stuff in an rpm format, users can use one of
several GUIs to install it. I don't know about Debian based systems, I
haven't played with those yet.
>I have been tasked to make an installer that "my parents could use"
>for Unix. I am interested in any and all suggestions. What do you
>expect from an installer?
Source code, autoconf/automake, but hey, that's just me :)
Honestly, I demand the ability to install the software anywhere I want :)
I hate software that insists upon being in /usr/bin or /opt and won't work if
it's not placed there. This is especially important in large networks
where much of the common software is installed on a centralized NFS file system
accessed by everyone on the network.
>What level of system administrator should be needed to install software?
Well, anyone *should* be able to install it, but in many cases, a sysadmin
will actually be responsible for it. Keep in mind, most of the world's unix
users don't use unix at home, only at work. (though I am personally seeing to
it that this changes ;)
>Should root access be required or suggested?
That completely depends upon where the user wants to install the application.
In most cases, yes, root will be required, however, in many cases it won't.
The installation should succeed if the installation location has the proper
write permissions set, and should fail if it doesn't. However, this is
something I don't think you need to worry about, since the OS won't let
anything get written to a location where the user doesn't have write access to.
> Was the Acrobat Reader for Linux the way to go?
It was sufficient, but IMO, could have been cleaner. RPMs, debs, and Solaris
pkgs are a lot easier to install since the user just types a single command
and "away she goes". The acrobat installer was nice in that it easily allowed
you to drop everything in place where you wanted it (something RPMs, debs, and
pkgs *don't* let you do).
I'd like to see more companys using GNU autoconf/automake so that I can
easily type:
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/foobar
make install
However, I can easily understand them not using it, since the documentation on
getting started with autoconf/automake is an endless and circularly referenced
set of poorly written texinfo pages :(
-----End of message to other vendor
Additionally I stated to a follow-up of this e-mail where it was stated:
>I believe that root access is required for RPM (as it should be, since there
>is no concept of a single user installation on Linux).
If the maintainers of RPM packages cared enough to make their stuff
relocatable, I could change the installation location to a place where I had
write permission to both the filesystem and the rpm database. I would then
not need root permission to install an application.
This is one of the many reasons why I don't like "Installers". They try way
to hard to provide what they think I might want to do, and are invariably
Hope that helps!
--
Seeya,
Paul
----
I'm in shape, my shape just happens to be pear!
If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!
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