On Monday 26 September 2005 08:54 pm, Michael A. Peters wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2005-09-27 at 00:37 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
>
> >
> > > No disrespect meant to the AbiWord team, but I think autopackage
is a
> > > bad idea.
> >
> > Autopackage is a fantastic idea which allows the Abiword developers
to
> > provide one package to serve a wide audience. Less work on
packaging and
> > more work actually developing the software they care about.
> >
> > What is more Rob went to the trouble of creating Autopackages and he
is
> > perfectly entitled to spend his development time doing whatever he
likes.
>
> Yes, autopackage certainly does have distinct advantages over some
other
> methods, I won't argue that - and it certainly is useful for
> distributions which do not package AbiWord or do not have current
> releases available - and yes, he absolutely can do anything he likes
and
> I'm extremely grateful for AbiWord and the AbiWord team.
>
> My problem with autopackage is that the benefits come with a trade
off,
> and that trade off is that you don't get the package dependency
> mechanisms of the operating system, which means the operating system
> package management system will allow apps to be uninstalled that are
> actually needed by apps installed with autopackage, and an improperly
> written autopackage (and there already have been some - afaik not from
> AbiWord) can hose files that do need to be maintained by the
> distribution package management system.
100% agreement with everything you have said before and after. I
would only add that a word processor is a core application in that
almost everyone has to have one. Debian had the same version
available as the now previous autopackage. I think the autopackage is
relatively better for applications that everyone doesn't use, for all
the reasons you have very well stated. My fear is that autopackaging
may make the debian packagers feel less pressure to keep up, and the
distribution will suffer. A less-used more specialized application
isn't repackaged often enough to suit its users anyway, and in that case
autopackage is much more advantageous to the user. If the autopackage
breaks something, what do you think the general user is
going to do? Go to another word processor, that's what. daveA
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Received on Tue Sep 27 16:59:53 2005
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