bcsi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > Success! You guys really know how to provide great support. Interesting that > this is the first time this issue has come to light?
IIRC, this installer came out several minor-versions into the 10.4.x series, and was probably never tested on the original one. > I also noticed a few quirks along the way. Please let me know if I should > report these in some other manner: > > * I was about to click OK on the dialog which asked for permission to modify > my .profile.sh but, it seemed to time out, automatically accepting the > default of OK. Or maybe my mouse just developed ESP? That's an odd one, dunno. > * The step of "Optimizing System Performance" seemed to be undocumented, so I > was left wondering what was happening. That's a standard thing that Installer often does after installing stuff. Nothing specific to or controllable by fink. > * Installing zenity as my first (binary) package, the package sizes seemed to > be missing for the dependencies. So currently I'm waiting for an unexpected > 11 MB download over a slow dial-up line, with no idea whether the next > dependency will be another big one. > > The last point would be fine for a Linux utility, where a sysadmin could > check sizes manually. But with Fink Commander being the first open source > program a typical Mac user will see, it could sure use more attention to > detail in letting the user make informed decisions. Is this planned, or > perhaps already under development? Addressing these two together: Fink Commander started as a separate project from fink itself, which Fink included it because it's a nice front end. Unfortunately, there's been no development on it in many, many, many months. Sad, and hopefully someone will step up and restart work there or write a replacement. I don't use it, and I don't usually recommend it to most users because... But also, Fink Commander is just an Aqua GUI wrapper around 'fink' and a few other unix commands. It doesn't fully use all the power of those commands (or indeed even know about some of their newer features...see previous paragraph). For your specific example, if one just wants to install from prebuilt binaries, the "apt*" commands know about all download sizes including dependencies. I think there are alternate graphical (or at least text-mode menu-driven) interfaces for apt that might exploit more of its features than Fink Commander does. OTOH, if you're talking about having fink (via Fink Commander) build packages or dependencies from their source code, "source download size" is not a piece of data that is currently stored anywhere. > Of course, your quick and effective support helps put all these issues in > perspective. But I'll be speaking to a Mac User Group on Thursday about Free > and Open Source Software, and am thinking about how to describe some of the > differences from commercial fare. I guess "a work in progress" would be > appropriate for some of the rough edges. Is the Fink project seeking help > with polishing some of those? We'd love help solving whatever problems you find (or even just knowing what problems or missing features you notice)! There's much more to do (even among what we already know about) than we have [time and/or skill] to do it:( So "those who know how" fix what bugs 'em the most. I got involved in hacking fink core because I was annoyed by some bugs and missing-features and knew some perl...now those bugs are skooshed and the features are there for everyone to enjoy. dan -- Daniel Macks [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.netspace.org/~dmacks ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Fink-beginners mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-beginners
