With an installer you have to assume somthing. Assuming that they have an OS is safe and if they have an OS it *can* run perl one way or another so coding in Perl makes sense to me (beside the obvious fact that if they don't have Perl well what can you say...) For most flavours of *nix perl is a given, for MS you could wrap the package into an exe with perl app. If you are looking at a Perl installer (as I am) Perl should be a given but as you say....

As you point out root/Administrator access is not always required although it almost always makes life easier. On Win2k Administrator is like root with the good bits removed anyway....

If you want a GUI HTML/CGI is the way to go but then you run into the issues of needing a browser and the ability to write a CGI with root issues and the assumption that you have httpd/IIS. Console is more portable, GUI is nicer

For an unistaller you need basically just need to write a file that lists all the changes so you can try to roll them back. XML along the lines of:

<write>
  /some/file/here/file.txt
</write>
<modify>
  /some/config/file.conf
  <change>
    <add>
      this
    </add>
    <delete>
      that
      <save>
        that here
      </save>
    </delete>
    <modify>
      s/this/that/
    </modify>
  </change>
</modify>
[download]

No choking if something is not where it was or the permissions are wrong, etc.

No delete, just modify and add so you can un-modify and rm to rollback.

cheers

tachyon

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