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KDE Installer Project
An Anonymous Coward writes: "There have been countless requests from KDE users, on the dot, on the lists, and even elsewhere, for a KDE Installer and Updater. Nick Betcher (aka Error403) has stepped up to the challenge and now needs your help to make this project really happen. His current code is in CVS and the project is in active development. The install starts off with an intro/detection screen, prompts the user for the type of installation, prompts for the destination of the KDE installation, and then prompts for the packages to install (see all the screenshots)."
Which is why ...
1. It makes sence for this to be an RPM only utility.
2. For those distributions with nothing similar, it can become that universal tool.
Sure Debian has this one feature we all like. However there are other things about Debian I don't like so what do we do ?
Either convince Debian to change the way it dose things to suite those who don't even use it as is. ( fat chance ). Or we simulate APT on other distributions.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Besides this effort which various people are questioning, is there anything else going on in terms of GUI-based installation, updating and package management? Maybe this guy needs more fresh horses and fewer critics, or maybe the effort needs to be focused on more viable attempts at this. Coming from the TW side of the street, I kind of like the idea of doing a GUI first, then maybe documenting how it ought to work from the user's point of view, then finally building the code to match. If that's what this guy's doing, I don't see the problem, but then, you developers can flame me as long as the flames are nice and bright so I get the benefit of the illumination along with the heat.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
While everything you say may well be true, I think you may be over judgemental on a few points, such as:
the guy who is "writting" it is a very new programmer with unfortuantly a very young attitudeOh, so just because someone is young and nieve doesn't mean they might have a good idea? I mean, who wants a web browser that supports inline images? And Napster can't be any good - I mean, how stupid could someone be to write a really simple piece of code just to trade music files. Everyone knows the music industry will put an end to that - he was so immature to even try. And how, of all the rediculous things, how could someone leave a good education at Harvard to go write software? (Hey, you may not like him, but you got to admit that they way they started MS when they did took guts.)
it has no planning and the only clear goal is to create an installerSo? Blue Sky Software set out with that lone goal many years ago. They were so successful that they had to change their corporate name to that of their flagship product: InstallShield.
I do realise that KDE needs an installer but unfortualtly is a bit of a way off yet.Well, rather than whining about it, why don't you go write one? Sound's like that's exactly what this guy decided. The way I read the /. post, it sounded like the project was just starting, which is why they (he) was soliciting help.
You know, I just won't go into the whole apt thing right now. Granted, it's a great installer, I just wish it ran on Mandrake (which I use because it was the easiest to install at the time). I will note that it's a little strange that the best way to install KDE is with apt when not too long ago the Debian folks wouldn't touch KDE with a ten foot pole and that's partially what precipitated the start of Gnome. . .
-"Zow"
These things are easy to solve for most of us, but I think it's worthwhile for KDE to offer
an easier way to upgrade.
But I doubt that the installer is it. You'll have one easy way to do it with Redhat, another for SuSE, another for Slackware, another for Debian, another for FreeBSD, another for OpenBSD, another for Solaris, another for AIX, another for IRIX...
Maybe if the Linux crowd got involved in the openports project...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Or get FreeBSD and simply install KDE by typing "cd /usr/ports/X11/kde-2.0.1; make install" ... any dependency required will be downloaded and installed without any tedious "rpm --***" crap.
Cheers!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Yes it has... it's called MandrakeUpdate, or apt-get, or any of a dozen other distro specific apps.
Although no one within KDE is saying "stop", the KDE team has, over and over again, said that it will NOT make an installer - in fact the KDE team dosen't release packages... for a Good Reason: they see packaging and installation as a distro's job. That way, the distro can choose your own flavor of packaging (deb, RPM, tarfile), your own path system (/usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /opt) and choice in systems is encouraged.
As a philosophy, this makes a helluva lot of sense: Slackware and Red Hat are on even footing when it comes to releasing KDE's latest and greatest. And if the new IBMinstall uses ".iop" files, then they can be easily packaged to that. Also, to address the monolithic nature of the structure of KDE, except for a few, well documented outside dependancies, KDE satifies it's own dependancies at compile and runtime. Most KDE apps are located outside of the KDE project as a result (or at least are not in the core groups: kdecore, kdegraphics, etc.) Many more can be found at: apps.kde.org, a freshmeat like listing.
All in all, the philosophies of KDE are well thought out, and make sense (IMO)... it just takes reading or talking to a few developers.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Standardization has been the driving force behind the industrial revolution. Before the industrial revolution, you had to make your own parts if you wanted to put something together because the parts you'd buy elsewhere would almost certainly be incompatible.
For software this is no different. If you look at the win32 platform for instance, you'll see my point. MS has succeeded in getting people to use their components. This has resulted in a large number of applications. From a technical persective there's nothing revolutionary about their stuff (some might even claim it is buggy and has obvious flaws). The Java platform is another example, by providing the same set of components on each VM, applications can be WORA. Often you don't even have to test it works and you can just assume it works.
Now under linux there's always more than one solution to a single problem. Whether we are talking about package management, window managers or even glibc. You can't make much assumptions about what will actually be running on a random linux install. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage: you get choice but at the same time, application developers must assume the common denominator rather than the latest and greatest to be present.
Jilles
It may depend on whether they release it with 2.4 as the default (or at least officially supported) kernel. It may also depend on whether gcc 3.0 is available (and reasonably trusted) by the time of release. If both of these things happen, they will almost certainly call it 8.0 (I would guess).
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
>The answer to your problems is simple. Compile from source.
rpm --rebuild
> Sure it takes longer to build a program than it does to install it. But it ain't much harder (./configure; make; make install). And you get to be 100% in control.
vi package.spec
rpm -ba package.spec
There are loads of advantages to rpm. If that makes me anally retentive, so be it. That's not a bad quality if you're a sysadmin.
For your machines at home, please do as you see fit. For machines that need to be administrated, rpm is my choice, and I have the feeling I have more control than them compile-from-source people.
--
The imp hits!
Are you the guy doing this KDE installer project? I think any successful project would have to appear a bit more professional than this.
First of all, there's a really useful word called "you're". Try using it sometime instead of "your". Only when appropriate, of course. Errors like that, especially in the screenshots, make your project look really unprofessional.
The Debian references did come up rather often in these comments, but what you said comes off like a flame against Debian. The remark that it "isn't as cool" is especially glaring. If you didn't mean to sound angry, why did you use phrases like "little pet apt"?
"If [you're] not a newbie, or you dont like this idea, please dont talk about it"? So you only want to hear from people who like your project exactly the way it is? Constructive criticism is essential if your project is going to succeed. If you tune out all criticism you're probably going to release something which nobody likes.
--
Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Anyway, you're not going to gain much popularity by saying, "IF YOU DONT LIKE MY IDEA OR PROGRAM ITSELF GO AWAY!" You go on to say you only want constructive criticism, but it would appear that criticism, constructive or not, is the one thing you don't want. At first I thought you seriously had something to offer Linux with this project, but now I see you just want people to worship you over this installer.
--
Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Of course ordinary people want something prettier than apt-get, but there's no reason his installer couldn't be based on apt or Red Carpet or something of the sort. However, whenever someone suggests something of the sort, he considers it a flame and dismisses it.
--
Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Okay, sorry, I should have said "something to offer Free Software". That's probably not even inclusive enough. Whatever.
The comments he seems the most fed up about are the ones that point out that he should base his installer on some existing installation system, instead of reinventing the wheel. His response is that he has spent "far too much time on this to start over". Translation: "No, this is MY installer! MINE MINE MINE!"
--
Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
The guy that posted is anti-Ximian, and thus I wouldn't be surprised if he was completely WRONG
:) Yes, I do dislike Ximian based on some of their actions. I dislike many things.
Thanks for the caps.
I determined the information myself, but confirnmed it with Maceij and George from Eazel when they were in Australia for Linux.conf.au. They're not Ximian employees, but they certainly know GNOME well enough and are familiar with the Ximian installer.
But wait... this is open source. Standards can be revised. Version 2.0 upgrade anyone?
I'd rather have most everything work one way and have a few quirks than have a half-dozen quirky methods.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
let me first say that I think KDE is great and personally I like it much better than GNOME. However, the one thing that is really inconvenient is that KDE packages are huge and monolithic, not necessarily in terms of byte-size but in terms of functionality. For instance, if I want to update Konqueror only, I have to update the entire kde-base (I think, it may be another kde-* package) package. GNOME I think also has the same problem on a slightly smaller scale. I'd love to be able to be able to update specific apps or libraries without having to download the entire package; the ideal installer would then detect dependencies and prompt for additional downloads as needed.
NO CARRIER
This sounds like kde wants to do it's own package management, which is scary. Package management should be easier, yes, but kde is simply the wrong place to fix the problem. Agreed, rpm isn't enough. Several dists provide the extra utils needed, the shining example is apt. Locating and installing packages is a breeze -- once you've configured the repositories you can just run apt-get install task-kde.
Now if you're talking about a gui layer above the OS package management, excellent! Debian has an excellent system in place, i here Mandrake has it's own too, and there are a number of upstart projects (check freshmeat). Just don't build it directly above rpm, there's no need to reinvent the wheel.
I haven't used an rpm based distribution in years, so i do have on question about rpm. Debian has a nice system for configuring packages (debconf), you can configure it to ask only a certain level of questions (critical,high,medium,low), remember your answers, and use a variety of interfaces. It'd be easy to add kde support to debconf, but how about rpm?
Why, isn't that :)
apt-get install task-kde
and
apt-get upgrade
need I say more?
And unlike a 'KDE installer' or a 'Ximian installer' this functionality isn't limited to one piece of software. Check out Debian or Progeny.
Those who do not know the past are doomed to reimplement it, poorly.
You download all the packages. rpm -Uvh kde*rpm
kdesupport needs OpenSSL. Okay, go and fetch that from rpmfind.net. Try again. kdelibs needs libmng etc etc. RPM only informs you of the dependencies, it doesn't resolve them. You also need to install in this order:
kdesupport, kdelibs, kdebase, then the rest. KDE 1 came with a very nice little install script, but that wouldn't work now that KDE is installed by default in different places by different distros (it wasn't in RedHat 5.2 when I first discovered KDE). The Ximian installer is nice, but according to a poster above, it force-installs everything, which has potentially disastrous results for your desktop, since it's not just GNOME rpms you need but stuff like libxml. apt-get sounds great, but Debian itself is for l33t3r h4x0rs than me.
Mandrake 7.0 was superb, Mandrake 7.1 was Mandrake's attempt at Windows 98 :-) and Mandrake 7.2 is again superb. I'm looking forward to 7.3 with interest.
Somehow I think that this 'developer' doesn't know his arse from his elbow.
Sorry, but I'm of the opinion that you simply don't have a clue.
Right now, when you go to the webpage, the server is down. A subdomain is being added by Nick. For right now, a temporary (very temporary) page is at http://sites.netscape.net/kdeinstaller
As it is, KDE is extremely hard to install and maintain. I don't know about you, but I sure do not feel like typing 'rpm -Uvh or -Ivh' at a prompt only to be informed that my version of Qt is out of date, forcing a trek to TrollTech's page to go and download it, only to be told I'm missing yet another obscure library.
I tried upgrading to KDE 2.0 from a Mandrake 7.1-based install, and it wreaked hell with the login manager (which was based on KDE). Whenever I tried to quit X, it booted me back to the broken graphical login screen. It was more bug-infested than Ultima IX, so bad I couldn't even launch the file manager without it crashing. I followed the exact instructions on the KDE web page, and a small note (buried in the ftp folders) told me that I needed the latest version of menu and deskdrake
menu? What's 'menu'? Does it mean menudrake? I'm confused.
I tried to get help on the #linux channel on EFnet, but of course I was rebounded to linuxdoc.org, which made no mention of the problems I was having.
I ended up having to do a complete reformat and reinstall of Mandrake 7.1. Very user _unfriendly_. Helix Gnome's installer, on the other hand, was terrific. I haven't had a problem with Gnome since.
Er, no. Installer was a clone of the already existing InstallShield program for Winblows.
The thing that Amiga had, which made it *really* pain-free installing, was a standardised directory structure, and an extensible but backwards compatible shared library system. It had this in 1985.
Does my bum look big in this?
KDE is not a linux distribution. Let the distributions do this; it's their job. Distributions ought to have a single tool for adding and removing software. And I mean adding software that you haven't downloaded yet.
Feeding a previously d/led rpm to a package manager doesnt cut it. It ought to act like a catalog of software that you can pick stuff you want and it'll D/L the RPMs and handle dependencies. Debian does this, but not in a newbie-friendly way.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Nick,
By alienating users, you would never get anyone to support your projects.
1. Your comments towards Debian are totally unnecessary.
2. Your main auidence are the newbies. There is no need to say all that crap to them.
3. Attitudes need to be restricted. Ego's need to be --purged. No one will help develop your software if your at the lead of that team. I know I would never want to join your team.
4. Be polite.
Trust the source!
If we insist on standardization, we run the risk of cutting off future innovation.
Because the formats are open, old formats can be converted to new.
Consider Linux binaries. The basic format is pretty standardized. Is that cutting off innovation? Unnecessary differences, on the other hand, are an incredible obstacle to progress. Consider how many programmer lifetimes are wasted dealing with byte-swapping, or because Unix, Mac, and PC ASCII files use different end-of-line codes. And there's no real advantage to any one of these.
I think the time has come that we've learned enough about what is good enough and what isn't, and need to try to merge a lot of these efforts into one great installer, rather than a bunch of limited ones.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
The developers over at KDE flatly objected to building a KDE installer and held firm for around 2 years. If not longer. However as KDE has spread to more and more newbies. The demands have grown.
Someone has finally caved in and written an app which is functional in it's 1st public release. Meaning he probably didn't start last weak.
Now the trick is to get distributions to adopt this and extend it for none KDE apps and tune it to the specific distribution. It's not like it's from a company that can sell services around it as is and it doesn't make sense for free projects to spend too much time on the unnecessary incompatibilities between distributions.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I can't believe people are bashing this guy for saying
"If your not a newbie, or you don't like this idea, please dont talk about it."
and calling him *egocentric*.
First of all, Slashdot has been completely infiltrated by people who want to do NOTHING but troll, piss people off, and do nothing constructive. If I posted a question to Slashdot, I would have to be prepared to ignore the majority of the posts as they would serve no constructive purpose whatsoever, and would just be attempting to debase the entire idea. This place is literally collapsing because of the amount of CRAP that people spew.
Now, this guy wants to make an installer FOR NEWBIES THAT WANT AN INSTALLER. That
is ALL he is writing this program for. I'll never use it. Many people here will never use it, but
maybe my dad or mom or other new Linux users will use it. However, people here can't
seem to get the concept of live and let live run through their heads. That's why we have a
constant bashing of Mozilla each time a new release comes out, by people who REALLY want to run lynx. So he's going to get all kinds of CRAP and INCENDARY suggestions from people who really doesn't want anything like what he's going to produce in the first place. This guy just doesn't want to have to go through MOUNTAINS OF CRAP to find the few suggestions that his REAL users want to give him. No, not EVERYONE wants to use apt, people these days have a complete fear of the command line. No, he doesn't want to use Redcarpet, can't we just leave it at that?
Now I know that everything here is going to turn into a HUGE flamefest, but PLEASE don't forward your comments to his e-mail or whatever UNLESS you really want to help.
Oh, and as for the lame grammar corrections, I think it is clear that this person speaks English as a second language. Not all programmers can speak english perfectly. I can understand what he is saying, even with incorrect grammar.
UPDATE: It turns out that Nick Betcher is an insecure egotist with nothing to offer the Linux community, trying to pass off a web page with crappy screenshots as a "project".
If you don't believe me, read one of the threads where Nick himself posted. Incidentally, one of them was modded down to -1 (does it signify something when the originator of the article is moderated "offtopic" and "troll"?), so you'll kinda have to hunt for it.
--
Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
I'd like to see KDE and Gnome get together and share helixcode's installer.
No offence, but you most definitely don't. The Helixcode installer force installs every package. This is a bad thing, and even worse that Helixcode choose not to document the fact broadly. Thus IRC channels and mailing lists are being perpetually flooded with users complaining the installer has raped their system. Try jumping on mandrake-expert sometime. It ain't pretty sorting out the mess. Ditto all the Red Hat 6.2 users who installed Helix before trying updating to 7.0
You could use Red Carpet, but frankly I don't think much of Ximian or their products (most notable the registration of about ten or fifteen KDE tradmarks on Google adwords).
Their already a packaging system independent automatic installer avaliable, that is tested and proved. Debian has used it for a long time, and many people use the distribution simply because of this (Debian is too hands on for me, I like the automation of other distributions). THe recent RPM port of APT (it was originally designed to be portable) by Connective means that Connectiva now uses this system and Linux Mandrake 7.3 will in the future.
I still recall when updating GNOME meant to download 30 odd rpms that you didnt know if you needed/wanted and praying nothing went wrong. Now helix (err, ximian) has this nice little installer to help you get it set up, and a nice little updater to tell you whats out of date. It's very easy to use and nice. KDE, AFAIK, hasnt had that so far. Putting that in widespread use would probably make KDE more popular among the *nix communities. Hey, maybe i'd even finally install KDE2
I am !amused.
Basically, any effort that goes into a GUI installer should be able to be utilised by apt (and rpm equivalents) without too much trouble -- they should not depend on having a GUI, and should not depend on any particular package format or file locations... it's all too complex :(
rr
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
Suppose someone develops a new, even better installer. But since it's not the same as your hypothetical Ximian/Helix universal installer, it would be shunned for not meeting the standard. Standards are made to be broken. It's hard to push the envelope in terms of technology and features when you're stuck with a strict standard to obey. Some of the best software programs have been the ones that have "thought outside the box" and rebuilt everything we know about a particular type of application. (Should we fault Linux for not supporting the "Windows standard?" I think not.) So let's not worry about setting a standard -- the best techonology will always set its own standard.
There's always different tools for different tasks. RPM might fit one project better, while the Debian packages might be the best choice for a second project. Let's not turn a hammer and a screwdriver into the same thing just for simplicity's sake.
Yu Suzuki
Yu Suzuki
Deamcast. It's thinking.
I think that one of the major hurdles that keeps the average computer user from using linux is the non-standardization, and sometimes lack of an easy installer program. I mean, if a windows user new to linux downloads the c source of something and nothing else, chances are they are going to have no idea what to do from there. If there was a excepted installer, like (gasp) Install Shield for windows, that anybody could use, and that most programs used to install, then i think alot more average people would use linux.
C:\
C:\Dos
C:\dos\run
Sigs are against my religion
I suggest that users who want to upgrade KDE easily use apt :). For me to upgrade KDE, I just do .deb and apt.
apt-get update;apt-get -yu dselect-upgrade
not only does that upgrade kde, it upgrades all of my system, and yes of course it can be set to only upgrade one package..
"I hate having to download 25+ rpms/source files and having to figure out libraries etc" Funny, since with Debian none of this is needed! Sorry if this sounds like another "apt is great, debian is great", but it IS. If you don't like having to install KDE on redhat with many odd rpms, then move to a decent distro based on
* This installer doesnt manage any packages. I dont know where you guys got that from, its false.
* This installer doesnt replace all the Debian users' little pet apt. If you are using Debian, please dont mention that all you need to do is a "apt-get blah blah blah". WE KNOW. And if your asking yourself "Why not just use Debian" its because apt doesnt have a cool installer like the KDE Installer, and its not as friendly as Mandrake and others (dont pick at that please).
* This installer wont be a wrapper for redcarpet. End of story. Too much work and planning has already been done to just turn around and change ideas.
* If your not a newbie, or you dont like this idea, please dont talk about it (You know who I'm talking to). It seems no matter how many times I visit slashdot, at least 65% of your comments are put-downs.
I'm sorry if I seemed mad the last comment, my temper with flamers only goes so far.
Thanks, Nick Betcher
P.S. Topics like 'flamebait' are getting old. If its humor, its old :) Also, this article isnt written in anger.
My (pretty obvious) two cents.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
Agreed. The packaging system independent APT does this well, but is nowhere near as friendly as it could be. And GUI installers are hilariously bad - what exactly is `a gnorpm'? Why when I click on a package do I get `KPACKAGE MUST BE RUN AS ROOT!!!!' rather than a password dialogue? Why can't I select 60 packages, open them similtaneously, and let the installer work out the dependencies?
* Make the code Open Source
* Make it cross platform, cross applciation (ie, and interface for apt), and cross licensing (this means closed source apps, too)
* Call it `Software Installer'. The command would be `installer'
* Allow cataloging (Eazel services, Red Hat network, and other subscriptions) into it. Allow people to make these services free (gratis) or otherwise.
* Make it secure. Put package signing into systems that don't have it yet.
* Have a set of packaging guidelines that go with it, defining things like granularity, package structure, menu icon guidelines, etc.
* If Oracle wants to, allow me to type in my credit card and download Oracle.
How about some manner of GENERIC installer? What a waste to have everyone who wants a GUI installer to have to roll one from scratch. This would even give all programs a common look-and-feel for their installations. Wouldn't that be nice?
Frankly I'll never convince my sister to "./configure; make; make test; make install". It'll just never happen. Even "apt-get install" is too much for some people. Having a common GUI installer with a consistant look and feel would be REALLY beneficial to new users and wouldn't hurt us l33t h4x0rz either...
I'm of the general philosophy that more effort needs to go in to GENERIC tools and less into non-portable or app-specific ones, that way real, large-scale, code reuse can happen.
Justin Dubs
I can''t believe this made slashdot :-( This is not good for KDE PR. Let me explain; this project is nothing more than a few bits of GUI created with QT's designer, there is no code behind it except for the auto generated stuff from designer and the guy who is "writting" it is a very new programmer with unfortuantly a very young attitude. I wish it was other wise but this project is doomed from the start, it has no planning and the only clear goal is to create an installer, how it will work is a mystery to the author but he has a gui.
I really feel bad posting this, GNU projects should be about community and sharing but you really should realise that this is one guy (that honestly has little clue) and is not the official KDE installer. My heart sunk when I saw this article, I do realise that KDE needs an installer but unfortualtly is a bit of a way off yet. For now, Debian apt is by far the best way to install KDE in binary form because of the way it's packaged but a lot of people don't run Debian. Compiling from source is obviously the most flexible route but is more trouble for those of us that want to get things done.
Again, this is unfortunate, please read the posts on dot.kde.org where the author has posted some very strange remarks but it backs this post up. I guess everything has a bright side though and this project highlights the easy of use of QT Designer.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security