[plug] Easy Installation: Linux Desktop Market

[Russell Steicke]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2005 at 11:02:10AM +0800, Kev wrote:
...
> I'm not talking about dependencies.  Cor blimey, don't get me going 
> there!  So I find a site where "Nik-Nak" is developed.  There's a list 
> 20 deep of .RPMs, .DEBs, .TARs, .GZ, .BZ, .BZ2 ad infinitum ad nauseum. 
>  Even the .RPMs and .DEBs will often have 6 or 8 different choices, 
> dependant on which distro I use.  You know me well Leon, and even I end 
> up just throwing my hands in the air and giving up at times. 
> Application installation in Linux is a mine field of utter crap!! 
> There's a reason why this subject occupies about 97% of a newbies 
> time/mind/concerns.  Application installation in Linux is "Industrys' 
> WORST Practice".

The root of the problem here is that we have lots of freedom to
distribute software before it's "ready".  When you have to hunt around
for dependencies like that, it's mostly because you're installing
something that's still in development, that a commercial developer
would still be working on in secret.

If this bothers you, you can ignore things that are not in your
distributions repositories.  Treat other stuff like a peek through the
factory window.  When it's "ready", it'll be imported into the apt or
yum or urpmi or whatever repositories.  Approach it like this, and
you'll have the benefit of supported software with much better package
and dependency management.

Meanwhile, people who don't mind getting dirty in technical details
can continue to do so, and you'll be better off for it.

It sounds like what you want is the hard technical things made easy.
That's not possible.  They can be covered up, or handled in a certain
way automatically for you, and that's what distributions are for.



-- 
Russell Steicke

-- Fortune says:
How many chunks could checkchunk check if checkchunk could check chunks?
	-- Alan Cox