don't know to explain it to you any better than to say that it doesn't work very often. If you need proof, just check out Bricolage and then take a look at Bricolage's bug database under 'Installation'.

OK, I'll take your word for it about the prevalence of reported install bugs. If the majority of bugs reported come under the install category, then I agree the idea of making *nix software installs as easy as on Windows has merit, if only to take advantage of the 80/20 rule.

That's strange. 30 processes is nothing to a modern Linux or BSD system with reasonable hardware. I'll be sure to tell people how much resource usage to expect, but I doubt it will be enough to put a dent in anyone's load average. This application is a development tool, like Bricolage, and not a front-end web service.

Ah gotcha. I was thinking in terms of memory usage leading to thrashing. Even then I suppose it's not too bad, One can build very nice Athlon servers with 1 GB RAM, 60 GB hard drives and dual server NICs for under $1K.

I think an installation system should target people with enough Unix experience to enter a few commands at a shell prompt and edit a text file. I've come to learn that expecting more is expecting too much.

OK, I can go along with that. I remember listening to the sysadmin for the Sun I did my CS homework on 15 years ago complaining about the lack of respect some of the Sun tech support engineers would give him ... nice guy, but not really cut out for a career in high tech :)

Memory usage for new processes is not very big on Linux due to Copy on Write. I don't know about other unixes - only that some version of Solaris did not do that and we had problems with apache servers on it.