[email protected] wrote:
I don't think that the missing of a gui is what is the problem today
for python. Package uninstall is something that bothers some (maybe a
lot) of users.
Yeah. Me too. Possibly made easier by having a GUI.
The biggest problem is that the installer does not save the information
necessary to perform the uninstall. A secondary problem is accounting
for dependencies between packages.
A GUI does not help either of these problems. If you can implement an
uninstall in the GUI, you can implement it from the command line.
Another point is to have something like webstart for
java. If I understand how it works, running an application goes like
this: If you open an app and it depends on another package not
installed on your system java goes around and download the missing
modules for you (and stores them in a relative place to the package or
the user package dir) so the application can run. This would be cool
for python, the problem being that there is no security to guarantee
that those modules are not malicious in any way...
I agree with that strongly.
I very much dislike things that automatically download and install
software. An automatic installer may find a different version of a
supporting package every time I install software on another machine.
I keep careful track of what is installed on all my machines. If the
tool automatically installs any version other than the one I specified,
then the tool is working _against_ me. I don't need that.
Ideally, there would be a flag that says "if you can't find something,
give me an error -- do not attempt to download/install anything". But
it would be helpful if it can tell me "Package xyzzy is missing, but you
can get it from here:..."
Mark S.
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