You have some good points, but I think there are serious benifits to doing it both ways:
> - If they aren't bundled, you need an installer instead of a > drag-and-drop application. That also requires authentication, which is > one of my least favorite consequences of installers. There are a lot of applications out there that use installers. I would say more than 50%. Users are pretty used to using an installer and it does not necessarily require authentication, it can install in the user's home folder just fine. > - If the user removes them, the application will fail with no friendly > error message, just the system crash dialog. Not a good user > experience. First of all, if the user starts deleting things in their frameworks folder they will have a broken system. Second, the application should never do this, regardless of libraries. Some sort of gui is needed in case something else goes wrong. > - If a different version of a library is installed in the same place, > you could get random crashes due to incompatibilities, and MythTV gets > unfairly labeled as buggy. This is true and a good reason to keep the frameworks private, although in theory there would be no need to install a different version, it would already be there. > - It makes it harder for the user to uninstall. If it's not in one > bundle, then they aren't sure if everything is cleaned up. If you have > an uninstall script, it could remove something in use by another > application. Either way, it's more of a hassle than dragging > MythFrontend.app to the trash. Um... ~/.mythtv ? I doubt most users will know how to delete that, and in either case, the frameworks could be used by other apps, they would do just fine staying where they are. I really hate to use Microsoft for this example but their Office Installer is great. It comes on a disk and you can either do a full install by dragging the application to your HD, or you can run the installer application which lets you chose where to put it and what gets installed. Might be a good idea, especially since it would let user's choose which plugins they want installed (people without a DVD player for instance would not want MythDVD installed).
_______________________________________________ mythtv-dev mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-dev
