A look at Firefox 0.9 [LWN.net]

A look at Firefox 0.9

Posted Jun 10, 2004 9:21 UTC (Thu) by rjw (guest, #10415)
Parent article: A look at Firefox 0.9

What is really the aim of the installer on Linux?

People are either going to install it thmeselves, from source, or they'll get it as a package. The import wizards should surely be part of the program proper, nothing to do with installation. They can run on first use as well.

I really hate this desire to make installation like windows. Windows is *far* far worse at package management than linux.... why copy a badly broken system?

One argument is that people want to install in their home dirs - this is an argument for a relocatable package , and also more work put into making programs installable for just one or a small set of users. GoboLinux probably has the right idea here - each package is in its own directory, bt I'm not too sure about their dependency system....

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A look at Firefox 0.9

Posted Jun 11, 2004 16:01 UTC (Fri) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

I kind of like the installer, since it allowed me to install in /opt/firefox-0.9. This makes it easy to run multiple versions on the same system, and I know where everything is so I can easily nuke it when I'm done using it without breaking anything.

Of course I was able to do this almost as easily with prior versions by unzipping the tarball in the correct directory and changing a few permissions. Both methods are a lot easier than editing a package so that it installs where I want it.