Gnucash RPM management ?

Seth Gordon sethg@ropine.com
2 Jul 2001 13:51:22 -0000


   OK. I will use it. 
   But all people are not familiar with apt. 
   I think the gnucash development has to offer a simpler way to install gnucash 
   for the non specialist users. This is why I spoke about a "Red Carpet" like 
   installation script. In addition, this will be useful if there are more and 
   more required packages in the future of gnucash.

Simplicity is more complicated than you might think.

When I tried to install Gnome 1.4 through Ximian, it went through the
whole download process and then complained "Unable to install package
..." (I forget which one).  After a few hours of retrying the download
and nosing around my system, I realized the problem: my /var partition
was full.  (I had separate partitions for /var, /var/lib, /var/web,
and /var/log -- it seemed like a good idea at the time -- and Red
Carpet tried to stuff its downloaded RPMs into a subdirectory of
/var/cache.)

Unfortunately, the Ximian installer (a) did not catch this particular
failure mode, and therefore gave a generic error message instead of a
"disk full" message; (b) did not check the free disk space in advance
and adjust its behavior accordingly; (c) did not provide the user with
any way to choose a different download location.

(Well, I could have created a symlink from /var/cache/whatever-it-was
to some directory on a larger partition, but you can't expect the
average end-user to figure out that this is the solution.  I finally
decided to just switch from Red Hat to Debian, and while Debian took
longer to set up at first, once I got GNOME installed and
/etc/apt/sources.list set up properly, I just typed "apt-get install
gnucash/unstable" and everything was downloaded and installed in two
minutes.  The only problem was that I forgot to back up my .xac file
before repartitioning my hard drive...)

I think this story illustrates how hard it is, in general, to do
package management in Linux -- there are just so many possible
configurations that it's hard for the person writing the package
manager to anticipate all of them.  Anyone who wants to make this
easier should be contributing tools for entire distributions, not just
for a single application.

-- 
"Rav would never cross a bridge when an idolator was on it; he said, 'Maybe he
will be judged and I will be taken with him.'  Shmuel would only cross a
bridge when an idolator was on it; he said, 'Satan cannot rule two nations [at
once].'  Rabbi Yannai would examine [the bridge] and cross."  --Shabbat 32a
== Seth Gordon == sethg@ropine.com == http://ropine.com/ == std. disclaimer ==