[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Bengt Richter) writes: > What do you think of automated secure importing/installing from a > remote server? You know, you try to import something and it imports > a stub that was included as a battery-place-holder and that has > basic help info and will give you reasonable options in directing > the installation of the full thing (or subset you are interested in).
You mean for Python modules, in ordinary operation? I'd hate that. For things like apt-get, used for installing nonstandard programs or getting security updates, I guess it's about as good as one can hope for. The user has to activate it explicitly though. I definitely don't want my computer opening internet connections unless I specifically ask it to. Doing otherwise is almost spyware. This may sound a little extreme but my distribution philosophy is I'd like to get closer to an environment where users normally never install any software of any type, ever. Microsoft cornered the OS market cornered by acheiving something pretty close to this: they deliver Windows with no installation needed. When people buy new computers, Windows is already on the hard drive, so the user just turns the computer on and Windows is there. Fedora Core (what I'm running now) isn't shipped that way by any computer makers that I know of, but it makes up for it by having lots of applications included. So I buy a new computer, put in the bootable Fedora DVD-ROM, and sit back for half an hour while a one-time installation runs. That's about as close as I can get to just turning on the new computer and having Fedora already there. > I don't see why every gee whiz thing has to be on your hard disk > from the first. And for those that want a big grabbag, the stubs > ought to be designed to to be runnable from a configured script, so > you can turn it loose and see what's up IRL. If I have a 400 gig hard drive, I don't see why I need 99.99% of it empty instead of 99.0% after I do my OS install. I don't want to hassle over downloading stuff for hours or days at a time, or about what components depend on other components, if the distro can just include it. I just tried to install a Python program that uses wxPython, except that meant I had to download both wxPython and wxWidgets, and the installations failed because of some version mismatch between the current wxWidgets distro and the version of GTK included with FC3. I spent an hour or so messing with it and then said screw it and gave up on the GUI part of that program. I'm more technical than most users (I'm a programmer) yet this installation stuff is too much hassle even for me. So I'd really rather that all that stuff be pre-configured. If a system has N downloadable components that are supposedly independent, there are 2**N combinations of them that anyone might have installed. In reality the indepdence is never that complete, so something can easily go wrong if you pick a combination that hasn't been tested and debugged by someone, and there's no way to test more than a few of the possibilities. So I'd rather that all N components already be included with the OS so that the combination will have been tested by the distro maintainers before the end user has to deal with it. Hard drives and distro media (DVD) are big enough now that it's quite reasonable for distros to include just about everything that most users could want. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
