Petreley On Simplifying Software Installation for Linux

markcappel writes "RAM, bandwidth, and disk space are cheap while system administrator time is expensive. That's the basis for Nicholas Petreley's 3,250-word outline for making Linux software installation painless and cross-distro." The summary paragraph gives some hint as to why this isn't likely to happen anytime soon.

Comments

Static linking problems

[digitalhermit]

Static linking might be useful as a workaround for the more esoteric distros, but it has its problems. For one, if you statically link your application then anytime there's a security fix or change to the linked library you'll need to recompile the application, not just upgrade the library. This would probably cost more in administration time than upgrading a single library since multiple applications may be dependent on the one library.

Fallback

[Anonymous Coward]

Place user applications in their own directories

This single rule alone would eliminate most of the problems. It enables fallback to manual package management, it resolves library conflicts, it avoids stale files after uninstallation and it prevents damaging the system which can be caused by overwriting files during installation and subsequently removing files during uninstallation.

General bad attitude towards anything easy

[Microlith]

The first obstacle to overcome is the bad attitude many linux users have that if something is easy to install, or easy to use, it is therefore bad.

As I see it, many would like to keep the learning curve very, very steep and high to maintain their exclusivity and "leetness" if you will.

For instance, the post above mine displays the ignorant attitude that "easy to install" by definition equals "unstable software" and has only a jab at MS to cite as a reference.

That's truly sad (though that may just be a symptom of being a slashdot reader.)

As I see it, not everyone finds: ./configure
make
make install

to be intuitive, much less easy, never mind what happens if you get compiler errors, or your build environment isn't the one the package wants *cough*mplayer*cough*, or if you even have said development environment.

Nor does it mean the software is any more stable. Could be just as shitty. _That_ is a matter of the developer of the program, not the install process.

No, please

[Yag]

Thats the reason windows servers are more vulnerable to attacks, because they give you the idea that its easy to mantain them... Its the same thing saying that you dont need any pilot on an airplane (and that you can put there anyone) if you make a good autopilot engine... We need more knowledge in system administration, not more automatisms.

It is not just the ease but the language...

[terraformer]

It is not just the ease of installation but also the language used during that installation that is foreign to many users. Having a nice point and click interface on linux installs is a major leap forward but these still reference things like firewalls, kernels, services, protocols etc. Most people, when faced with new terms become disoriented and their frustration level rises. These setup routines have to ask users what they are looking to accomplish with their brand spanking new linux install.

• Would you like to serve web pages? (Yes or No where the answer installs and configures Apache)
• Would you like to share files with other users in your home/office/school? (Yes or No where the answer installs and configures Samba)

Etc...

static linking not a good idea, here's why

[dh003i]

I posted this elsewhere, but it is worth posting again. There are at least 6 reasons why shared libraries are still better than every app having it's own library:

1. Bandwidth. No-one wants to have to take 2-4x as long to download programs.
   
   
2. Hard-drive space. Even if we all had 40GB hard-drives, no-one wants to waste it reproducing the same information a hundred times. People buy hard-drives to store data, not twenty copies of the same library.
   
   
3. RAM.Loading two copies of the same library wastes RAM.
   
   
4. Load-time.Having to load all of the libraries will increase load-time compared to cases where some were already opened (by other apps) and you don't have to load them.
   
   
5. Consistency.Part of the benefit of having shared libraries is shared behavior. Destroyed if app X uses Qt 2.0 and app Y uses Qt 3.0.
   
   
6. The Big 3S: Security, Stability, and Speed.Who knwos what insecure, unstable, and poorly performing version of a library each app comes with. And who knows what crappy options it was compiled with. Resolving these issues at one central point can be counted out. You want to deal with any of these issues, you'd have to do it for every application's version of a library. That means doing it many times separately.

The solution to dependency-hell is to design better dependency management. Reverse-dependency management -- so as to remove useless libraries when no-longern needed and avoid bloat -- would also be good. Gentoo is doing pretty well in these categories.

On making install process' simple. I think that a graphical installation does not necessarily make things any easier. Anyone here played Descent 2? That installed by a good old-fashioned DOS-installation. And it was not particularly hard to install, even though it was not a GUI-install.

It is also not necessarily a good idea to abstract into oblivion the technical details behind an install. Part of the philosophy behind Gentoo, for example, is to take newbies and turn them into advanced users. I think that a clear well thought-out install guide is a useful thing. Gentoo's install guide is thorough and has virtually no noise. Compare that to the install-guides for Debian, which are affirmative nightmares, filled with irrelevant stuff. Furthermore, a helpful and friendly user-community is always a good way to help new users orient themselves. New users are going to ask questions on forums that advanced users find obvious. That should not be an invitation to say, "RTFM bitch" at the top of your lungs. All of us were newbies at one point, and just because we may have had to learn things the hard way doesn't mean that others should too.