I think this is a problem that will have to be solved with all the distros in a room. Unless we come up with a solution that is so elegant end-users just use it.
Saying we shouldn't do an installer because each distro is different, is ignoring a user problem. apt-get and yum are beyond the average user that I think we are trying to target ... (If we ever want more than 10% market share, we can't count apt-get and yum as solutions. We also can't live in a world where you have to use multiple installers. Last time I installed something on Ubuntu, I used their installer and then got sent to synaptic.) Stormy On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 12:15 PM, Brian Cameron <brian.came...@sun.com>wrote: > > Dave: > > I am against any Linux ISD (including ourselves) trying to provide a >> one-size-fits-all installer, until a packaging system that allows that comes >> along. I have high hopes for PackageKit, but in the meantime, your goal >> should not be to give people installers, but to document installing it on >> the most popular distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Fedora, SuSe) with >> generic "apt-get" or "yum" instructions. Each distribution has a >> distribution specific installer, that is what we should be targeting. >> > > I have to say that I agree with you. I know, for example, that Sun > Microsystems patches the upstream code in numerous ways to make the code > work on Solaris/OpenSolaris. We work hard to get our patches upstream, > but there is usually a lag time and some modules are not well maintained > (we have patches in bugzilla for modules like libgnome and gnome-vfs > that have sat idle for years). > > Providing an installer that provides builds that are not provided by > distro are bound to not have such needed patches and modifications, be > hard to support, and will likely not work well or as users expect. > > Perhaps, instead of providing an installer, we could just point users > towards the correct resources to get the latest code from their distro > directly? Or perhaps we could write a wrapper script that provides a > common interface for the various distro update systems? > > Brian > >
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