Re: Call for standardized package installation procedure

Phil Tomson wrote:
> In article <[e-mail]>,
>  <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>>>From: Hal E. Fulton [mailto:[e-mail]]
>>>I'll address these issues just from
>>>my own point of view.
>>>
.......Lots of stufff....many KBs.......
> 
> That's it for a package with no dependencies.  If there are dependencies 
> you can declare them in your install.rb and installpkg uses raa-install to 
> go find the packages you need to install.
> 
> I basically just took Aoki-san's install.rb and wrapped it in a module and 
> added a couple of module methods - so it is a bit of a kludge, but it 
> seems to work.
> 
> I'm using installpkg for my RHDL package and I've heard from a few others 
> that are using it as their package installer.  Something like this should 
> be included in the standard library.

This is the 'yes, but...' stage of the discussion.
Somebody mentioned about newbies not being able to find where all the 
files should go etc. On the other side I find it onerous to learn more 
than a description of where things go: Building an install package is 
one of the things I would like to have to do once (preferably by someone 
else, but it seems like a good idea for ruby practice).
Now, I don't think it's hard (I actually think it's very easy) to build 
a tool in Ruby that can be included either in the RAA or the distro that:
1. picks the dependencies out of require statements (ok, not those that 
are programmatically generated, but then these would belong to the app 
most of the time, and somebody smarter than me could come up with a 
solution)
2. create a tar.gz file that has the app and an install script, 
conditionally creating a windows distro with a self-extracting file
3. include in the distro a readme.1st that is standard ('call install.rb 
and everything is going to go to it's place)

Now, install.rb can also double check if there is a directory with the 
same name etc. Version conflicts are a big subject, which we can discuss 
further if you want. My personal needs at the moment would be more than 
covered by something that does no version checking (other than ruby 
version checking - and that can be set automagically by the creator 
script of the package)

Where I want to end up is:
I don't want to build a script that installs my script. I don't want to 
have a library that makes it easier to build that script. I want an 
application that has all those things AND the script that builds my 
distro and install script - this would cover 75% percent of cases. Add a 
few extension hooks in a well defined execution flow and you would cover 
99% of cases. Anybody who builds something such an app can't handle (in 
it's utopic/completed form) is surely able to extend the install library 
and write his own. Onerous jobs like these are prime target for clever 
people using powerful languages :).
I'll shut up and go dive in setup.rb now to find out what it does...
V.-


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