On Tuesday 01 February 2005 18:17, Brad Templeton wrote: > On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 10:44:09AM -0500, John Johnson wrote: > > I just don't understand why it (software installation) can't be as easy as it is on a Mac. On a Mac, in most cases, installing software consists of dragging the application from the file you downloaded into the Applications folder. That's it. > > > > The "Mac" is a vastly more limited set of hardware platforms and > software platform configurations. Linux tools are built from a vast > array of contributed dependencies, and have to run on an immense > number of different configurations, both of hardware and of systems. > > This makes the linux problem a lot harder, and it doesn't help that > the people doing the installers are almost always volunteers (thought that > is of course also true for some software on the Mac and PC.)
Ummm... but you have to compare apple to apples here (that's lower-case 'a' in 'apple' :-). When it comes to packaging, you can't take into account different hardware architectures. Obviously you need separate packages for x86-32, x86-64, PPC, Alpha, SPARC, etc. So yes, the Linux problem is 'harder', but only inasmuch as you would need to build packages for multiple hardware architectures. However, there are two things about Linux that introduce extra complexity: shared dependencies, and differences between distributions. Both of these concerns can be mitigated (if not altogether eliminated) by a self-contained packaging scheme like the one used by OS X. [snip] > The Mac gets that (clearly desirable) drag and install at a very > high price. As I understand it, the main "price" that Mac packagers pay for having drag-and-install is disk usage, because any dependencies that aren't part of the base system (i.e., Apple-supplied stuff) are bundled into the package. So, if you had 3 different packages from 3 vendors that all used, say, libmp3lame, then each package would either statically link libmp3lame, or bundle a version of the shared library in with the app (Fink packages aside, since they're not really OS X packages). Obviously, the cost here is disk space -- potentially 3 copies of a library on your disk -- but it does give the added benefit of peaceful coexistence of packages which use different versions of the same library, totally side-stepping any "dependency hell" whatsoever. -JAC _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
