[plug] Easy Installation: Linux Desktop Market

[Leon Brooks]

On Tuesday 25 October 2005 22:03, Kev wrote:
> Even your typical Windoze user can go into "Windoze Exploder"
> and remove dead apps and clean up some of the mess left
> behind by rogue apps.

Yah. Some of.

Then manually troll through the Registry looking for more crap, then 
find some stuff tucked away in the rooly-trooly-we-mean-it-this-time 
invisible folders, and more in AutoExec/Config, assorted startup 
folders, yadda yadda...

There's a *reason* for people periodically wipe-and-reinstalling their 
MS-Windows partitions every so often, y'know?

> No, the Windows or OS/2 way is definitely a better way for end users.

True only for inveterate fiddlers, which 99% of them aren't. Just so you 
can get started on it, you can unpack an RPM by hand if you like, and 
distribute the bits around alphabetically or however else it suits you. 
You can also pull down RPM sources and easily rebuild them, which gives 
you another opportunity to rearrange your personal universe to suit.

> Newbies are flabbergasted just at the maze of different packages
> there are for the one app.  It's a mine field just learning which
> package you require, let alone having no clue where all of its little
> tentacles disappear to during the install.

No, it's not. Sorting all of that crap out is the computer's job. Just 
type synaptic whatever or yum whatever or urpmi whatever (or click on 
the corresponding part of a GUI) and let the silicon genius (well, 
actually, just a very fast idiot) find the dependencies.

The Windows way is to bundle every single dependency into the installer 
program, which bloats them and leads directly to a multitude of 
semi-compatible copies of the same thing floating around the machine, 
with results you may well imagine (or observe, if you're not so 
fortunate).

Only about one in four uses an MSI package, most of the rest are a mazy 
of twisty little custom-built installers.

If you're using a Linux package manager, you can *find*out* where it 
(plans to) put things, done the Windows way you have no hope.

The command to see where an RPM puts stuff is rpm -ql packagename; to 
see what the uninstalled RPM will do, rpm -qlp nameofrpmfile. On 
Mandrake, you can use urpmq -i packagename to find that out before even 
downloading the package. rpm -qf /path/to/file will tell you which 
package laid the file in question.

Debian's system has similar facilities. Windows has *nothing*. Nada. 
Diddly-squat. Sweet Fanny Adams. You on you _own_, bowah!

There are good reasons why files go where they do. Take a look at clamd, 
for example:

/etc/clamd.conf                  Standard place for configurations
/etc/logrotate.d/clamd           Ditto for logrotate scripts
/etc/rc.d/init.d/clamd           Ditto for a service controller script
/usr/sbin/clamd                  Ditto for a non-boot system binary
/usr/share/man/man8/clamd.8.bz2  Ditto for an administrative manual page
/var/log/clamav/clamd.log        Ditto for a log file (logrotate and
                                 syslog will know about this)

Have you read Rute yet? That might make it clearer. Either way, 
separating me from good standard package management again will require 
hydraulic tools.

Cheers; Leon

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