[plug] hmmm Linus being opinionated again :-)

[Leon Brooks]

On Thursday 15 December 2005 05:36, Mark J Gaynor wrote:
> I think a lightweight install for average users would be a better
> option for ALL Linux distros.

Here's an alternative to think about: in Mandriva, at least, each GUI 
package drops (a) file(s) into a menu directory to explain to the 
menuing system how it is launched. It would not be a difficult thing to 
parse every package in a repository looking for these files and peeling 
out enough of the information from them to build a "ghost" menu tree, 
and shoving that into another package.

With said package installed, doing something like Shift-MenuButton would 
produce a _complete_ menu system with the not-yet-installed items 
greyed out. Kind of like the opposite of MS-Windows' entry-hiding 
technology.

Clicking on such an entry would produce a window with a description of 
the package (rpm -qi) and a button to install it. Clicking on the 
button would pop up a request for a password (for non-superusers), 
install the package (and any dependencies; "Ho, there, naive IceWM 
user! Installing that KDE tool will drag in Konqueror, a bunch of 
IOslaves, ripping, burning and transcoding tools, the KDE libraries 
themselves and support libraries for a bazillion data formats and 
stuff, and I see that you only have a dialup connection: are you sure 
you're going to live long enough to use this?"), and then run it as if 
it had already been installed.

Cheers; Leon

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