[Cialug] Free Codeweavers

[David Champion]

Ken MacLeod wrote:
> 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
>   
I agree it would be preferable to use the the systems native installer. 
You're not going to get past the fact that some people don't want to 
give you the source, so you're either going to get a binary installer, 
or a binary only native package (rpm, deb etc).

I hate binary installers that ignore your system's standards, and 
install things in odd locations like /opt.

The loki setup that some things use (Id's Quake3) was pretty nice - it 
let you at least choose the install location. It lost steam when Loki 
Games went out of business, but Icculus (Ryan Gordon) is still working 
with it.

http://icculus.org/loki_setup/

Of course, there's also Autopackage. I've installed a few things with 
it, but I've never really been a big fan of it. I suppose it would be 
nice if they got enough momentum to have the Autopackage stuff included 
in most distros, so you didn't have to install Autopackage to install 
Autopackage packages. If that makes any sense at all.

http://autopackage.org/

-dc