On Tue, 2001-09-18 at 04:16, Franki wrote:
> I think two other things would help,. a gui and console tool that does smart
> tarball installs and updates the rpm database for that app, and one that can
> get dependencies for you,, (goes to a mandrake update site list...etc etc.
> or asks for the CD, or both) preferably the same app.
Debian has apt-get, which does exactly this. Rpm still doesn't do it,
although rpmdrake (front-end to grpmi, which actually does the work)
does a decent job of it. But for packages which Mandrake does not
create, rpmdrake will do you no good :-(
> and a self extracting tarball, (sort of like winzips self extracting file,,
> a new tarball format that can have a shell or perl script wrapper around the
> actual tarfile that untars and starts the install for you.. (then updates
> the RPM databse...downloads dependencies etc etc....) even if it was 10%
> bigger then a standard tarball, people would go for it because of the ease
> of install and removal and "smart installing" features, [snip]
As a matter of fact, I have seen such a beast. Nessus (www.nessus.org)
comes in a self-installing shell script. Just download and run nessus.sh
(or whatever it was called), and the script will run, which actually
unzips and untars the file, then checks dependencies, configures,
compiles, and installs. At the beginning, it asks for the root password,
so it can complete the install later on. It is very slick.
Dave
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