random thoughts on software installation

[Colin Walters]

On Thu, 2007-05-17 at 14:43 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-05-17 at 14:37 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> > On Thu, 2007-05-17 at 14:34 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > > This is a fundamentally broken assumption.  Multiple packages are
> > > required because packages can and do depend on other packages.  Even
> > > things like python-paramiko, etc.
> > 
> > Sure, I guess I didn't mean transaction in the techncial sense but more
> > like how it's exposed in the interface; i.e. that you don't need to take
> > the current approach that pirut does where you click on a bunch of
> > things and then have an "apply" step and a confirm step, or yum's
> > install confirmation.  Could just start downloading and installing on
> > the first click.
> 
> And then people complain you didn't tell them what was going to be
> pulled in or why did this that or the other get installed or why did
> something get _removed_ due to an obsoletes.

Seems solvable - display below each name the list of packages you'd need
to install to get it.  I doubt any of these have huge dependency trees
because we're assuming for this tool that you already have base things
like the 'Development Tools' group installed.  I'd imagine this tool
would come with that group, or maybe we need a 'Base Development
Environment' that has graphical things.  Would be cool to have anyways
say for a spin of Fedora explicitly targeted for developers.

As for packages getting removed...are there really any developer tools
that obsolete earlier ones that would matter to someone?  The obsolete
type situations I imagine would mostly have already been done when
someone does a big upgrade from Fedora x to x+1, not after they've
installed.

Anyways...techncial details!  Think about how cool it would be =)