Linked by Jeremy LaCroix on Thu 3rd Jun 2004 07:02 UTC
During the majority of my time working with computers, Windows was the operating system of choice. Reason being, it's all I've known. In 2002, I took a college course titled "Linux Administration" which entitled me to a few cd-roms of Redhat 7.x. While this course was nothing more than a few extra credits for me, I fell in love with Linux and went through the entire textbook a week into the class. It was a nice feeling to use something "different" than what I was used to.
Permalink for comment
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
So, your issues of usability are purely related to packaging? -1 : More descriptive title needed.
As for your idea of bunding all deps with a package, it's been done. Download some proprietary (and some not) games that use the loki installer. It's just like windows: you pick a directory for the install, click "Go" and that's it. In many cases, the developer includes any used libraries beyond X and GL in this package. Unfortunately, that means:
-Bigger package
-User ends up with several different OpenAL.so or whatever library on their system
-User uses whatever version was around at time of program release (with its bugs).
Mostly, the reason for this lack of dependancy bundling is that it's a great deal more work for the developers. You'll notice that big-biz free software is packaged monolithically. Most free software isn't, because the developer isn't interested in taking responsibility for distribution of other people's packages. Example: A new version of libSDL came out that fixes that fullscreen bug! Should I push out a new version of the package, or wait for that bug in libogg to get fixed? It's a contamination of responsibility, and breaks up the powerful delegation of one bit of code to one project/person.
Having said all that, if you're interested in development of installation technology, see http://www.autopackage.org/