[Cialug] Free Codeweavers

[Ken MacLeod]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 10:09 AM, Zachary Kotlarek <zach at kotlarek.com> wrote:
> And as other have mentioned, many commercial programs packaged this way --
> like Java or Oracle -- are *not* available as source or in any other
> packaging format.

When I've spoken to companies that do this they make these two claims:

 1)  It's easier for them to develop and maintain one installer.
 2)  It's more consistent for their customers who use multiple platforms.

They stick to their guns even after I point out for (1) that writing
an N-platform installer is no more or less easy to develop and
maintain than building N native packages (with far less "active" code
likely to be buggy) and for (2) that it's far simpler for a customer
to learn only the native package system of their chosen OS(s), rather
than that system *plus* each vendor's custom installer.  The common
response to (2) is that their customers "don't do that", i.e. Oracle's
customer, the DBA, only installs Oracle, someone else installs the OS
and other packages.

Worse, in any company where I've been involved in evaluating products
like these the installation, upgrade, migration, management, and
disaster recovery of these products is not part of the evaluation
criteria, and yet we then turned around and spent weeks either
automating or documenting the procedures to do just that.

As counterexamples, IBM's DB2 installs very nicely with RPM or Solaris
packages and there's jpackage.org for Java.

  -- Ken