Re: Installer UI advices

[Adrian Robert]

On Mar 12, 2005, at 5:40 AM, Markus Hitter wrote:
> > This scheme is only used for apps that don't require additional files.
>
> It should be highly encouraged to design apps this way, even at the 
> cost of some duplicated files/libraries/whatever. It makes handling 
> the software so much easier and you won't have any headaches with 
> different version requirements for the same framework/library.

In an ideal world, yes, but in practice there are certain resources 
that need to be installed in system-wide locations.  Libraries come 
first to mind, but there are others like info files, man pages, desktop 
menu or icon files, and so on.  All of these must either go into a 
standard place on the system so that management and access applications 
(indexers, browsers, UI constructors, etc.) can find them.  Worse 
still, sometimes just putting a file someplace is not enough.  For 
example, Linux needs a run of 'ldconfig' after libraries are installed, 
and info files need their directory contents files updated.

This could be fixed by developing a standard for bundling system 
resources inside an app and having some type of system scanning process 
pick up information on newly installed materials.  But it's not easy to 
pull this off.  Even NeXT/Apple and Microsoft, who control their entire 
OSes, could not succeed in fully achieving modularity.  (In fact, 
actually Microsoft bungled it quite badly, despite designing the major 
parts of their framework the latest, with Windows 95..)