:~>On Mon, 15 Nov 1999, you wrote:
:~>> One barrier
:~>> which will be an INCREASING problem among the distributions is the lack of
:~>> an analog of the "InstallShield Wizard". I think one could be written.
:~>
:~> Check out the Zenguin Installer, www.zenguin.org. It's an effort to do
:~>exactly what you've described (although, I haven't heard any news on it in a
:~>while).
There was an discussion on this problem a while back on "slashdot". Loki
has published something similar and while the idea might sound interesting
to someone used to "ISW", it could have horrendeous consequences if not
done right.
"Right" means, take a package in whatever formate it is, ask some
questions if nessesarily and BUILD A BINARY PACKAGE IN A NATIVE FORMATE
FOR THE DISTRIBUTION YOU ARE RUNNING AT WHICH ALREADY HAS ALL THE CONFIG
FILES PREPARED FOR YOUR NEEDS.
For Mandrake this would mean building a binary RPM (source RPM would be a
plus) out of whatever type of package you have. "alien" is a step in a
good direction, but misses the "dependencies-checking". I am also not
avare of a way to put "pre-install" "post-install" and "post-uninstall"
scripts in an alienised rpm package.
If I would have a tool which just takes a RPM, and makes a new RPM out of
it with "fixed" configuration-files and if nessesary dependencies, it
would save me a lot of work. To understand just how much work could be
saved, imagine a network with many machines. I take one of them, install
what i need, FIX THE PACKAGES, set-up a NFS-exported directory with fixed
packages and install the rest of the machines using the NFS-install.
Updating is even more important: I use "autorpm" for that - If i could
easily change rpm-packages in the above described way, it would save me
the work of putting the altered config files on all the machines
afterwards. I know that a cron job can do that for me ( it is just a
question of making a tarball and letting the cron unpack it AFTER the
"autorpm" has installed the packages...). By the way, if any of you has a
beter way of updating multiple machines, I am eagre to hear it.
cu
Denis
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Mag. Denis Havlik <http://www.ap.univie.ac.at/users/havlik>
University of Vienna ||| e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Austria (@ @) tel: (++431) 4277/51179
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