Re: LibO Install/Update ( was [tdf-discuss] Automatic Updates)

On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 9:35 PM, Marc Paré <marc@marcpare.com> wrote:
> Le 2010-10-09 16:50, Scott Furry a écrit :
> > On 09/10/10 02:11 PM, Marc Paré wrote:
> > <snip>
> > > I agree, direction from the whole community on this, now that we have
> > > hashed it out a bit, would give clearer direction of expectations.
> >
> > <snip>
> > > This could then be put to the community as a new thread and the
> > > results could be monitored/taken into note for the future planning of
> > > the LibO method of updates from the dev team.
> > >
> > > Marc
> >
> > Mark,
> > I like you rewrite. I can work with that, mind if I 'borrow it?' ;-)
> >
> > I'll post a new thread shortly.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Scott Furry
>
> No problem. That is what we are here for. :-)
>
> Marc


There is another, somewhat independent issue that has occurred to me.
What about how the components are split up?  The issues are somewhat
different for windows and mac than they are for linux.

For windows and mac, if someone, for instance, only wants a database
program, should they have to download the entire program suite just to
install that one program?  There are a couple possible solutions to
this (in addition to the status quo).  One is that we supply the
current all-inclusive installer, as well as a separate installers for
the individual parts.

An alternative is that we provide an online installer, where you
download a small program, tell it what you want to install, and it
retrieves those bits and installs them.  This also has the advantage
that the actual download the user has to worry about deleting later is
very small, the rest of the downloads would be stored in a temporary
directory that would be automatically deleted later.

It occurred to me that this is, in essence, what the updater would do.
 So really you would only need one program, the updater, which would
also be able to handle the original installation.  You could just
download the updater and have it retrieve the latest versions of
whatever parts of the program you want from the servers.  This also
makes it easier for users who, say, install writer and find they like
it to easily install other components right from within the program.

For Linux, the issue is how the parts of the suite are divided up and
named.  Different distributions use lots of different ways to break up
the suite into individual packages and lots of different names for
those packages.  It is not possible to force distributions to use any
particular naming scheme, but I think that providing recommendations
and guidelines for how the packages should be divided up would be very
helpful.  Users would have a better idea what they need to install to
get the features they want, tech support will be easier because people
using different distributions can communicate more effectively about
what they have installed, and switching between different versions of
the software provided by different groups would be easier.  Of course
the content of these guidelines would require a lot of discussion with
distributions, but I would like to think distributions would be
willing to follow such guidelines if they are reasonable.

-Todd

--
To unsubscribe, e-mail to discuss+help@documentfoundation.org
All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted.
List archives are available at http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/discuss/