Re: More an autopackage

[Michael Sweet]

Geoffrey Wossum wrote:
> 
> > Actually, you could probably steal the script stuff from the
> > portable.c file that shows the license agreement.  I wouldn't wait
> > for the response (that would break GUI installers), but at least
> > you can cat out the license agreement to the screen...
> 
> But just displaying the license doesn't have any legal force.  The
> user has to be forced to "click-through".  For free software
> purposes, this isn't a big deal, but it is for commercial software.

Believe me, I know all about commercial issues, but if you are going
to use the RPM format you can't depend on using the console to
confirm, or even the GUI.

FWIW, the EPM portable format also comes with an InstallShield-
style setup program that shows the license agreement in the window
(the same scripts show the license on the console if installed
without the setup GUI...)

> ...
> As far as sub-packages go, it isn't a big deal to make subpackages
> with epm 2.2.  You just make a seperate list file for each package.

Right, but that doesn't help when you want a single package with
optional parts, which more closely matches the IRIX, HP-UX, and
Solaris packagers.

> ...
> I had a .in file that configure was macro substituting to get the
> same effect.

The advantage with the variable support is that it works around
the ${prefix} that usually ends up in exec_prefix, etc.

> ...
> I assume this requires coorperation with the underlying platform
> packager?

Yes.  The main issue is to support the version dependencies in the
portable distributions - the RPM, inst, etc. formats can already
be easily extended to support the version numbers since they support
them natively.

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products                  address@hidden
Printing Software for UNIX                       http://www.easysw.com