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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Suggestion to allow easier maintainance of software distributed as
From:       een3sae () leeds ! ac ! uk
Date:       2004-01-08 23:36:38
Message-ID: 1073604998.3ffde9864839f () webmail3 ! leeds ! ac ! uk
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In my opinion tarballs are a developer friendly/user unfriendly format. 
Developers love them as it is realtively quick and simple to distribute 
software like this, but they are quite awakward for your average user to deal 
with and use to install software. 
 
I feel the approach i am about to suggest may go some way to alleviating this. 
Im not a developer so i dont know how feasible this idea is but here goes: 
 
Why not add extra functionality to KConfigure so that Kconfigure can 
automatically add an entry to the RPM database when a user compiles and 
installs an applications distributed as a source tarball? Surely the necessary 
destination filepaths to which files are copied during installation should be  
contained in the shell scripts executed when a user/KConfigure does a "make 
install"? If this script could be processed automatically by KConfigure upon 
installation and an entry added to the RPM database AUTOMATICALLY this would 
make software maintainance for your end user much easier for software 
distributed as tarballs - he/she could use the package manager to remove/
upgrade the software. 
 
Even if it is not possible to process the script as i have suggested above 
surely it would not be difficult simply to log the filepaths to which 
KConfigure copies file during installation and then have KConfigure add an 
entry to the RPM database based on this? I seem to remember when Win95 first 
came out a number of third party programs were kicking about which would 
monitor and log the installation processes of pre Win95 programs that didnt 
support automatic software uninstallation so that they could be automatically 
and safely removed by the user at a later date. 
 
I appreciate that it is often possible to do a "make uninstall" on software 
distributed as a tarball when you want to get rid of it making my suggestion 
largely unnecessary, but this relies on the user still having the original 
sources for that software lying about on their system somewhere, and I have 
personally found that a lot of developers dont implement this. 
 
-=+Stephen Ellwood+=- 
 
 
 
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