IBM unveiled technology intended to reduce complexity in software installation and packaging and has submitted it to the W3C for consideration as an industry standard. Dubbed Solution Installation for Autonomic Computing, the technology enables software developers and software vendors to improve the installation and support experience and simplify the software packaging process, according to IBM. Developers would be able to build packaged software for installation on a variety of platforms.
IBM pursues software installation standard
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Eugenia Loli
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woooo-hoooo go IBM. Seriously, I don’t know if this really means anything solid but it’s nice to hear such big names being involved in software installation standardization effort. Hopefully this means simpler software installations for Linux systems without relying on repositories… finally.
>> InstallShield Software and Zero G Software also are
>> partners on the proposed industry standard.
and
>> Products from IBM that use Solution Installation
>> technology are anticipated within the next year,
>> although each product group must make that
>> determination, Bartlett said.
It’s so nice to see how they’re so open about their (probably) not so open software (little information, no links).
Still interesting, though.
You probably don’t understand few things.
Relying on repositories is and will be needed, as long as you install dinamically linked applications. This way linked applications do not provide libraries. This is the reason for repositories.
While on the other hand static linked application provides all dependacies. Try blender, azareus, firefox… Just copy them somewhere and enjoy.
Blah:
It’s so nice to see how they’re so open about their (probably) not so open software (little information, no links).
From the article summary:
IBM unveiled technology intended to reduce complexity in software installation and packaging and has submitted it to the W3C for consideration as an industry standard.
You want their installation software to? They’re trying to make it into a recognized and publicly available industry standard. How much more open can you get? I applaud any company of this size in this day is using their position to promote a needed standard that can benefit everyone.
I don’t understand a great deal about the scope of the standard. I can’t say I see the point of building a cross-platform install (packaging?) method when barley any of the installed software is cross-platofrm. I could see with UNIX/Linux binary compatibility in some cases where this might be progress, but where does InstallShield fit in (btw, are they owned by Real Mdia now?).
The article mentions “An XML-based packaging schema”
This sound a bit like what autopackage is aiming to do.
http://autopackage.org/overview.html
I guess there will be more details later on.
A technology like this, that is an open standard and OS/hardware platform independant, combined with and OS/platform indepentant platform, like what java, .net, parrot, etc. could be, would really make life much easier for users.
Image it, you would need only to download the program setup file, without thinking about what OS or hardware they have. This would make for real choice in which OS or hardware you want to run.
I hope to see that kind of freedom one day.
“Relying on repositories is and will be needed, as long as you install dinamically linked applications. This way linked applications do not provide libraries. This is the reason for repositories.”
From what I understand of dynamically linked libraries are that they only require that the system handles dependencies and sometimes communication between libraries. If repositories were nessecary then how is it possible that people download RPMs, or even source code for that matter and make and install themselves? They don’t need the repositories, they just need to make sure all the libraries are installed that are needed and that they are can be linked at runtime (dynamically).
So as I see it repositories are not nessecary at all, they are just convenient for companies to provide software that has been tested for a particular distro or packaging scheme.
Also regardless of who is together with IBM’s reported movement for standarized software installations, the movement and effort is probably good for the computing in general as it will push others to compete in developing this much needed standard/feature.
>> InstallShield Software and Zero G Software also are
>> partners on the proposed industry standard.
This was a good idea, but the clowns from InstallShield had to be brought in for whatever reason.
That’s the death of this project right here. Pretty much nobody within the Free Software/Open Source world is going to touch anything that has InstallShield fingerprints on it.
I dont understand the problem with installshield, if it makes it easier to install packages on Linux then its great, because it brings more people to Linux. If they dont want to share their code or whatever then they dont have to, its their right, some systems used propriatary systems, SUSE and YAST untill resently, Linspire and their installer. Common people how hypocritical is it to praise a company in the Linux community that has some propriatary system but shun one thats trying to help the industry grow?
Great idea, but “solutions” installer, come on, i don’t install “solutions”, i install “software”. too much marketing talk i’m afraid.
I know the idea of a solution and not an app was good, but it is so overused and used out of context now that it makes me sick just seeing the word ‘solution’.
That’s the death of this project right here. Pretty much nobody within the Free Software/Open Source world is going to touch anything that has InstallShield fingerprints on it.
I’m curious as to the reason ? They write decent installers (at least for the windows patform).
Is it because they are a closed source company in the business for profit ?
Seems like that attitude does more to hurt the adoption of Linux than help it (if thats the reason)
Whoops. Hmm… Well, as far as packaging, we’ve already got tar.bz2 files. And for installation/uninstallation, it’s just:
{unpack source code}
{possibly ./configure}
make
make install
{try out software for a while}
make uninstall # if you don’t want it after all.
Now, what is it IBM is offering that I need? If one of the above steps fails, you contact the developer(s) and get it straightend out. Go figure.
there have been closed source programs running open source operating systems before… and its quite likely there will be again
and the only people that “boycot” them are extremists
whether they like it or not there aren’t enough of them to kill the products they don’t like… because there are far more level headed people out there that will use what they want to use
Software is an answer to a problem; thus, a solution. Games are a solution to our bordedom; operating systems are a solution to our desire for high tech digital kung-fu, word processors are a solution to our frusteration with notepad…
The word ‘solution’ being used instead of ‘application’ is nothing new.
http://nsis.sourceforge.net/
They’re are scriptable and open source. What can InstallShield
do that Nullsoft can’t?
Uh, install software under Linux and Mac OSX?
A standerd for Linux OSs, please, oh please. Skrew windows they don’t need anything for it.
This is indeed very good news. Having a W3C approved standard would help software dissemination a great deal. I thank IBM for this initiative. As to the idiot, who claimed, “who needs this, we already have ./configure & make and & make install”, your attitude does not help new Linux users.
Lay people need an easy way to install software.
> I can’t say I see the point of building
> a cross-platform install (packaging?) method
> when barley any of the installed software
> is cross-platofrm.
Mozilla and OpenOffice are noteworthy cross-platform software. Java software can be run on JREs on many platforms. The Gnome foundation is apparently working to make a .net RE for Linux. There’s WINE and a bunch of other (not) emulators of MS Windows. Then there are VMs. A particular area of interest could be remote installation over a LAN. The coolest application though, in my opinion, would be managing the software installed on one OS (or in fact the installation of the OS itself) from within another OS. I’m all for it.
This article is so vague as to be useless. Its a nice idea, but do you really want 50MB downloads for Firefox? Because you need all the binaries for the different systems. Unless you use Java (.Net isn’t quite cross platform, or can Mono run ALL .Net code?).
And yeah, Red Hat and Mandrake aren’t going to be happy with it unless its also an open-source solution. What the hell do the W3C have to do with this? Will this be like the Mozilla XPI installs for web browsers?
Open Source and Closed source both have their plave, and this isnt’ a place for closed source.
W3C does not approve close source standards. What’s the matter with you people? Read the freaking article!
That’s the death of this project right here. Pretty much nobody within the Free Software/Open Source world is going to touch anything that has InstallShield fingerprints on it.
I’m curious as to the reason ? They write decent installers (at least for the windows patform).
Is it because they are a closed source company in the business for profit ?
Seems like that attitude does more to hurt the adoption of Linux than help it (if thats the reason)
I’m not the original poster but I agree with them and it has nothing to do with being closed or open source. The problem is that InstallShield is architecturally broken and any new system based on the same principles is going to be broken also. It has multiple problems:
– No easy way of determining what it is going to do before an install. It’s all opaque.
– Scripting builtin and frequently used in installs. This is broken because almost by definition scripting isn’t undo-able and that means most installs aren’t truly undo-able, they always leave crap lying around.
– The user interface is different for every install, largely because of idiotic company “branding”.
– Poor handling of privilege violations and basically no way of doing test installs in non-privileged areas.
– Poor handling of errors in general such as disk full and media errors.
– GUI, non-scripted installs are a huge waste of time for large sites.
– Limited tracking of shared files (DLL’s etc.) and configuration file entries.
The basic problem is that InstallShield doesn’t recognise that an install is nothing more than a file copy operation and they unnecessarily complicate an otherwise simple process. Look at the Mac to see how it should be done, with an install simply being a folder copy. Yes, I know I’m pinning MSWindows and application problems on InstallShield but even so they could have done a much better job of hiding the problems and separating hardware/software probing, dependency management and package installation/copying.