BadgerFiles

Ian Murdock has a post titled “Software installation on Linux: Today, it sucks (part 1):”

Anyone who has ever installed software on Linux is familiar with this song and dance. If it’s in your distro of choice, you’re only an apt-get or a yum install away from running it. But if not, you’d better know what you’re doing, have a lot of patience, and understand how to construct effective Google search terms. (And, no, moving everything into the distribution is not a very good option. Remember that one of the key tenets of open source is decentralization, so if the only solution is to centralize everything, there’s something fundamentally wrong with this picture.)

The song and dance he mentions is the familiar dance card: Figuring out dependencies, finding dependencies, installing dependencies, and launching programs. Been there; done it; helped others do it.

Ian, of course, is working to make the Linux Standard Base (LSB) the answer to software installation problems. Hopefully, the answer isn’t too far off, but I fear we’ve already reached the fundamentally wrong stage of centralizing everything on the distribution’s install. When I need five CDs to install Fedora Core, something is wrong. The last time I installed Ubuntu, on the other hand, I only needed one CD.

Simplicity. We all crave it.