Autopackage 1.0 [LWN.net]

Autopackage 1.0

Posted Mar 31, 2005 19:45 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Autopackage 1.0 by boudewijn
Parent article: Autopackage 1.0

Where this idea come from ?

Biggest problem with non-distribution install is conflicts between packages from different sources. When you are using distribution packages this problem is mostly absent, but when you are trying to install different packages from different sources you need sandboxing (at the very least any change should be cancellable). And as Windows world showed delegating this cancelability to program creators is "totally bad idea"(tm) - package system should enforce some rules. See Windows Installer for some ideas - it's not great implementation of the idea but it's still better then InstallShit^H^H^H^H^H^HAutopackage.

Autopackage is good old "plug-and-pray" idea: run installation script and hope for the best. If it does not work... you are out of luck: there are few knobs to press and they are not readily available. This is biggest problem with installers in Windows world: if everything works fine, then user is happy. If installer does not work then you are reduced to dances with tambourines - there are no good way to track problems. Any installer can screw you system beyond recognition and there are no way to see what installer will do and there are no way to prevent suck screwups.

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Autopackage 1.0

Posted Apr 1, 2005 12:05 UTC (Fri) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

"Where this idea come from ?"

Well, you know, the everyday practice of being a maintainer of an open
source application who wants to give people a chance at having a go at
his application with minimal effort on his part... I can use apbuild to
create a binary that runs almost anywhere -- and if I package it in
autopackage my users will have nice frontend, too.

Of course, if you're going to forbid me to distribute Krita as an
autopackage, no doubt you're going to help me create proper debs and
rpms', aren't you? My email address is boud@valdyas.org. Thanks in
advance for helping me do the proper thing!

Autopackage 1.0

Posted Apr 2, 2005 20:32 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Have you really tried to do this ? Autopackage is very unreliable when KDE (or any C++) applications are concerned. It's not a solution, after all - It's band-aid (and poor band-aid). If you want to life in world full of band-aids you can as well switch to Windows.

I never said Autopackage is trying to solve non-existing problem. But it does it so poorly that then end result will be more frustration for users and more problems instead of less.

At least with .deb or .rpm I can find a way to make it work on my Gentoo-based system (did it few times with programs not included in protage). With Autopackage I can not: it installs fine, but in most cases it does not work and there are no hints to show me why.

P.S. Of course I have pretty minimal installation of Gentoo as sacrificial system (everything compiled with gcc 3.4.x, for example): do you really think I'll be comfortable enough to run strange scripts on my work system and/or install lots of unused stuff on my test system ?

Autopackage 1.0

Posted Apr 10, 2005 21:55 UTC (Sun) by FooBarWidget (guest, #10500) [Link]

Bandaids can help speeding up the recovery. If you dismiss all bandaids, and keep aiming for The Perfect Solution(tm), then you will never get work done.

"With Autopackage I can not: it installs fine, but in most cases it does not work and there are no hints to show me why."

Care to explain what exactly the problem is? There are other Gentoo users using autopackages but so far nobody has reported that it does not work. If there's a bug, then it must be fixed.