The intent of Yast, it seems, is to provide coordinated control over the
software that's installed on one's system. It certainly works well for
the software provided by SuSE, and from what I've read it also works
tolerably well for some (but not all) packages in RPM format. The
hangup there seems to be packages that were specifically configured for
RedHat systems.
But what's missing is a facility for keeping track of packages that
aren't provided by SuSE and are in .tgz form. It was suggested to me
that the instmon tool would help with those - but that still leaves me
with two different, uncoordinated package managers. I'd very much like
to see Yast enhanced to become a really effective general package
manager.
There are several cases to consider:
1. Packages not provided by SuSE at all.
2. SuSE updates to previously installed .tgz packages.
3. .tgz updates or extensions to SuSE packages.
Installing a .tgz package has two basic steps: unpacking the package and
installing its contents. The installation typically involves three
substeps (for Gnuish software, anyway):
./configure
make all (which does the compilation)
make install
However, there are lots of variations, so I see little hope of
automating the installation phase.
What Yast *could* do would be to do the unpack to a standard location,
take a snapshot of the system, and then instruct the user to do the
installation. After the installation is complete, Yast would then take
a second snapsnot. (That's more or less what instmon does.) Those
snapshots could then be used for automated uninstallation. Optionally,
the unpacked files could then be discarded. The package would be
included in Yast's list of what's in the system.
Yast does in fact process .tgz files - but all it does is to unpack them
to the root directory--which is worse than useless.
A couple of examples of things I've done or plan to do:
- Installing KDE 1.1 on a SuSE 5.3 system (works fine, but I dread the
next update)
- Installing the TeXLive distribution
Thoughts, anyone?
Paul Abrahams
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