Re: setup wishes -- any volunteers

[Christopher Faylor <cgf at redhat dot com>]

On Sat, Mar 24, 2001 at 02:12:47PM +1100, Robert Collins wrote:
>> So, to use Chuck's example, when you click on inetutils, you
>> automatically also select cygwin and ncurses for
>download/installation,
>> if they are newer than what is on your system.  If this dependency
>> is not useful for some people then maybe we can include a "use
>dependency"
>> checkbox.
>
>Or perhaps a "Warning - you have a missing dependencie foo. Here are
>your options to resolve it (give list of possible packages with a
>default selected). If the user selects none, then it's downloaded
>irrespective of dependencies.

I dunno.  I think I'd rather just "do the right thing".  You could
invalidate the dependency check automatically if people are using
setup.exe in "wget" mode (as Chuck calls it) and only invoke it when
actually installing.  But, I'd rather not have to wade through an
"Are you sure" every time I upgrade something.  I'd rather that setup
just did this automatically unless I specifically told it not to.

>Agreed. A point that's been missed above though: When a windows user
>sets up a program they expect to see configuration dialogs ("What
>username should service foo run as"). These are completely missing at
>the moment. I know next-to-nothing about rpm's internals so I cannot
>authoritatively comment... but whatever ends up behind the scenes needs
>to be able to pop up such dialogs, and only the ones relevant to the
>software being installed. So when I choose sshd (as opposed to ssh) in
>the software list, I want a configuration box to comeup after it's
>downloaded asking me what user to run the service as.

Good point.  That has always been a goal for setup, too.  RPM has user
scripts that can be run.  Adapting them to Windows might be tricky.

Having something that asks setup questions for ssh and inetutils could
cut down mailing list traffic quite a bit.

cgf