Loki releases an installer

Loki Entertainment has just released their Installer program under the LGPL license. This installer uses an XML description file to describe a package, and provides both a console and a GTk front-end to install it. I think this installer is excellent for newbies. What do you think?

Comments

The right way to do the wrong thing

[Daniel]

I have mixed feelings here. On the one hand, it's great that Loki is releasing this, and it looks to be a much better way of installing software than simply having a random perl script to unpack tars (VMware) or something.

On the other hand...
I have a great aversion to installing random cruft on my system. I have an even greater aversion to letting a random program install random cruft on my system. Is there a separate file to run to uninstall each program? (looks like it, in fact you have to build a custom program for each app that needs to be uninstalled) So to delete stuff installed with this program I have to hunt down the uninstaller. Probably better to just install in /usr/local/stow and rm -rf the whole lot. And how do I track what I've installed once I install more than two or three? How do I update to the latest patchlevel? Download patches and run them? If I find a file and can't remember what program it belongs to, how do I check?

Loki would be doing a much greater service to themselves and the world by having the installer auto-generate packages from the generic package description. InstallShield-type stuff, where each program in the world ships with its own special installer, is an ugly and inelegant hack. The most redeeming quality this installer could have would be if it took command-line options to specify all the attributes of the install (eg, bindir=, datadir=, etc) and skip the interactive stuff -- this would allow halfway-useful packages to be made fairly easily. Ah well..

Daniel