Warning. Agitated rant ahead.
In a moment of Friday afternoon boredom following a tweet about a certain competition I decided to check out the state of the 'official' offering and got the Linux install from http://appdeveloper.intel.com/en-us/meego-sdk-suite. Smallish thing, an installer I think to myself, okay... Are you sure ? Of course I'm sure. It says it wants sudo and stuff... well, okay, I would have preferred to do the apt-getting myself if that's what it does anyway... I know, what kind of idiot sudos some random installer from the Internet... Well, I did happen to have a previous install on my otherwise bog-standard Lucid hack-machine and the installer happily offers to remove 6-7 packages from that. Says continue with existing not recommended, well, okay, then proceed with remove... And yes, I know, that's a double fail, I asked for it (cue laugh). As it turns out, the eager beaver installer apt-get bloody *force* removed pretty much all of my Kubuntu install, all the way down to kdm. WTF ? But you said just 6-7 packages... (haha, sucker !). But a fail is a fail only if you don't learn from it, so let's see what we can learn from this incident (apart from saying 'no thanks' to stupid sudo-requiring installers even if they come from official sources). Checking out the installer script you can see what caused the meltdown: echo " MeeGo SDK components found." echo $PKGS setFontColor "red" echo -e " The following packages are installed and will be uninstalled\n" \ "prior to installing the MeeGo SDK:" echo " $PKGS" setFontColor "blue" echo -e " Would you like to uninstall all previously " \ "installed MeeGo SDK components now?\n" \ "\t(u)ninstall now\n" \ "\t(s)kip uninstall and proceed (not recommended)\n" \ "\t(e)xit installation" read -p " Select option (u/s/e): " setFontColor "default" if [ "$REPLY" == "u" ] && [ "$REPLY" != "U" ]; then if [ "$OS" == "Ubuntu" ]; then apt-get autoremove -y $PKGS \ (is this safe / necessary ?) I don't know who asked that there, but let me answer. I don't know if it's necessary, but it's VERY not safe (I'll refrain from using derogatory terms this time). You display the packages YOU want to uninstall and then tell apt to remove whatever IT thinks is right (along with, you know, dependencies). What the frack happened to apt-get --just-print (dry-run) and then proceeding ? And I thought the QtSDK is sometimes a bit rough around the edges and people are sometimes too heavy criticizing error-prone SDK setups... but that's peanuts compared to this monster-fail, seeing apt kill your install was not a pleasant sight (now I know how people accidentlaly typing rm -rf / feel). Not. Frackin'. Funny. At. All. Sorry about the agitated mail, now I have the weekend fun of a devel machine to setup, instead of doing something productive like the initial idea from an hour ago of publishing something to AppUp developer challenge by using the official tools in the process. I guess you can call that learning the hard way. End of rant. And have a nice day. Attila
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