klik://wesnoth-latest [LWN.net]

klik://wesnoth-latest

Posted Oct 6, 2005 14:55 UTC (Thu) by lovelace (guest, #278)
Parent article: The Battle for Wesnoth hits 1.0

Wesnoth has also apparently become a good example of how easy it is to make a klik package. It appears that within 3 hours of the debian package being uploaded someone had made a klik package of it. (http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1517)

to post comments

klik://wesnoth-latest

Posted Oct 6, 2005 15:25 UTC (Thu) by proski (guest, #104) [Link] (4 responses)

I see references to Klik in comments to several stories. It looks like astroturfing to me. If appearance of e.g. Fedoda packages for particular software is not newsworthy, why is it for Klik? Maybe you could contribute a good lengthy article about Klik instead of sticking a short comment to every story?

klik://wesnoth-latest

Posted Oct 6, 2005 19:15 UTC (Thu) by yokem_55 (subscriber, #10498) [Link] (1 responses)

It's notable, in part because it isn't the same as a Fedora package. Klik packages are user runnable files that is fairly distribution independant, which makes it very easy to get to the software without a) building and installing it yourself, or b) waiting for your distro to package it for your system. Thus for new stuff coming out, klik packages represent a nice, quick and easy way to try new software.

klik://wesnoth-latest

Posted Oct 6, 2005 22:11 UTC (Thu) by piman (guest, #8957) [Link]

> b) waiting for your distro to package it for your system.

Except Klik packages are built out of Debian packages. So while you might not have to wait for *your* distribution to package it, you could also just be running Debian.

klik://wesnoth-latest

Posted Oct 6, 2005 19:41 UTC (Thu) by lovelace (guest, #278) [Link] (1 responses)

I have absolutely nothing to do with klik and, in fact, I've never actually used klik myself. I just happened to see that article on Wesnoth and klik just yesterday and thought it would be a good example of how fast open source moves, especially since it was relevant to the article.

Your allegations of "astroturfing" are completely and utterly unfounded.

klik://wesnoth-latest

Posted Oct 7, 2005 0:18 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

Your allegations of "astroturfing" are completely and utterly unfounded.

Your implication that there were allegations of astroturfing is what is unfounded. That comment ("this looks like ...") just states the author's impression. As such, it invites contradiction by a more knowledgeable person, which you thankfully supplied.

klik://wesnoth-latest

Posted Oct 7, 2005 15:58 UTC (Fri) by erich (guest, #7127) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't see a point in using klik, except to make my system behave less predictable (and thus less stable).
klik reminds me a lot of autopackage, which I think is a very bad concept.
Also how is klik supposed to e.g. prevent things like the C++ API differences?
No, I'm really happy with my distributions dependency management, so I do not intend to install anything else.

klik://wesnoth-latest

Posted Oct 9, 2005 13:12 UTC (Sun) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

Klik differs from autopackage in that klik does not expect to install stuff onto your machine. It just downloads the files needed to run the application into an "AppDir", and runs it from there. See the architecture documentation for full details. It therefore cannot conflict with your distribution package management (unlike autopackage), and uninstalling your klik packages (restoring the system to its lack-of-klik state) is a simple case of deleting the downloaded AppDirs (which won't conflict with anything from the distro).

klik://wesnoth-latest

Posted Oct 14, 2005 14:57 UTC (Fri) by quintesse (guest, #14569) [Link]

Which is not entirely true of course if the package makes system-global changes like file associations, menu items, icons, etc. Especially if those were taken by an existing program already.

But at the same time I'm sure that in the end those problems can be fixed or worked around.