[Cialug] Free Codeweavers

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 10:37 AM, Ken MacLeod <ken at bitsko.slc.ut.us> 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.

I don't disagree, but iirc, crossover office installs as the local
user, not as root. I'm not sure what way is better, but if you don't
have root access to your machine, the .sh method of installing has its
benefits. Is there a simpler way to install and configure a piece of
software in one step?

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode