[Lazarus] cross-distro (and OS) app installation - what would you like?

Mattias Gaertner nc-gaertnma at netcologne.de
Thu Jan 21 10:20:01 CET 2010


On Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:44:21 +0200
Graeme Geldenhuys <graemeg.lists at gmail.com> wrote:

> Mattias Gaertner wrote:
> >>    * have other customization options during the install. Not easily
> >>      at least. I have seen a handful of .deb packages that prompt for
> >>      a Yes/No question, but that's about it. Most prompted in a console
> >>      window (ugly) and one or two prompted in a GTK2 dialog (no idea how).
> > 
> > The frontend can be anything. Some GUIs shows graphical dialogs for
> > the questions.
> 
> Point is, are all package management systems equal in there features. Does
> all of them support showing readme, custom questions, GUI dialogs etc?

I don't know all systems.

 
> > Other points:
> > deb/rpm/ports/... repositories have some advantages:
> > - mirrors
> > - databases of all installed files
> > - databases of all available files and packages
> > - automatic update of all packages
> > - automatic install of sets of packages
> 
> And more points against repositories...
> 
> * repositories are not meant for commercial software. At least I haven't
> seen any. And no the "meta" packages that simply install a script, that
> then has to use something like wget to download the actual commercial
> software doesn't cut it for us. eg: Microsoft Core Web Fonts .deb package.
> 
> * You must have an internet connection (and a reasonably fast one at that).
> Realisticly, many South African internet user still use dial-up modems.
> 
> * A full install of our flagship product is 8GB in size. I don't even want
> to download that with my 3G modem. My internet connection at home is capped
> at 500MB per month. Only this year are we switched to DVDs - before that we
> shipped our product on a CD set (+- 12 disks).

That's why there are linux distributions on dvd.

Graeme, a single file installer is a great idea, so I beg you to implement it.

And when you achieved the goal that your installer has all the
information about file destinations, icons, menu entries,
registry, ..., there will be feature requests to create deb/rpm from
that information.

Mattias




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