in reply to Perl-based Installshield clone

Well an installer would be nice to have of course, but there are problems associateed with it:

A good installer has to be able to be run on any system with perl on it and how are u going to embrace all the different soft- (i.e. win, linux, mac, bsd, etc) and hardware (x86, PPC, S390, ...) architectures out there?
I mean even if u concentrate on linux u will have a problem: will it run on redhat? will it run on SuSE? and whats with debian or rocklinux?

So to put it shortly: In my oppinion it's definetly a nice idea but not the time for it yet. We first need a set of standards which everyone follows. The not-existing of these standards is as i see it the only reason why no general automated installers exist in linux. The only automated installers we have are distribution specific like rpm, apt-get, yast etc.


--
"WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR IF NOT THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN"
-- Terry Pratchett, "Reaper Man"

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Re: Re: Perl-based Installshield clone
by Jouke (Curate) on Jul 12, 2001 at 15:49 UTC
    I don't quite get your problem...

    I don't see what the OS, or hardware has to do with the installation of compiled binaries on a system where you only have to say where to put the files and to add icons to programgroups and desktops.

    Sure, I have to cope with different windowmanagers like KDE, Gnome and Win32, but that's something I can live with.

    If you know what Installshield does, you know that is's just a shell around a 'copy the files to the right directory'...well, OK, a bit more than that, but basically it has nothing to do with the OS and not at all with hardware...

    Jouke Visser, Perl 'Adept'
    Using Perl to help the disabled: pVoice and pStory
      Well the right places for the files varies from system to system. u may wanit it to put in /usr/bin /bin /usr/local/bin /some/place/else same goes for libraries and all other stuff. Each distribution handles this sort different

      --
      "WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR IF NOT THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN"
      -- Terry Pratchett, "Reaper Man"