"Richard O'Keefe" <o...@cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote: > Some of the right questions are > - how many potential <whatever> users would need to have > <whatever> installed on _some_ machine they do NOT have > administrator access to? > Irrelevant.
> - if people find Mac and Windows installers that show you where > something is going to be put and offer you the chance to change > it acceptable, why exactly would that be unacceptable under > Linux or Solaris? > It's perfectly acceptable, even required, but, for the love of UNIX, take that path as a parameter, don't do a GUI. If you want a GUI, write it in terms of that script. > - since we know install-anywhere binary releases are possible, > and since we know that an installer _can_ probe to see whether > installation in /usr/local (or any other "standard" place) is > possible, why not do it? > I really, really don't like the idea of a program behaving differently based on the permissions it has, short of failing to do what I told it to do. OTOH, quickly checking whether the user has write permissions to / and failing with "you need root right to do that, did you mean to call this script with --user?" instead of failing with access denied errors is a Good Thing.[1] Echoing "binaries were installed in $HOME/.cabal/bin", and checking the user's $PATH and displaying a warning if that directory isn't in it is a Good Thing, too. I guess it's also the main problem those not literate in UNIX have with cabal. [1] Does install --user check whether configure was called with --user, too? I hope so... -- (c) this sig last receiving data processing entity. Inspect headers for copyright history. All rights reserved. Copying, hiring, renting, performance and/or quoting of this signature prohibited. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe