Sure, I'll give it a shot Tuesday when I'm back in the office. Should I uninstall before doing this?
By the way, on Friday I reran the .package on my existing install, and it upgraded perfectly. Very nice. :-)
A few wishlist items...
For the graphics-based installation it would probably be wise to minimize the amount of stuff occuring on the console. There's a couple places where the user has to type 'Y' or hit enter in a console window, that would be better implemented as buttons in a GUI dialog.
At a couple points it prompts 'Y/n' but just hitting 'enter' does not do the same as hitting 'Y', as one would expect. This needs to be fixed.
While the upgrade process was very smooth and effective, it felt like something was missing. Perhaps this was because it occurred all on the console and I was expecting a GUI to pop up, or perhaps because it wasn't obvious that an upgrade had actually occurred (I had to launch Inkscape and try out a feature I new had just been changed in order to verify it). So I guess what was missing was a bit more feedback. Maybe a dialog that pops up and says, "Inkscape has been successfully upgraded from version X to version Y." It'd be extremely cool if it could also list "What's changed", although I'm not sure how that info could be easily pulled in...
Probably during installation in general it'd be worth having a final screen that very clearly says, "The installation of Inkscape version X was a success." A summary of dependencies installed and maybe the release notes might be nice.
Do you have a hook for displaying the license? For some apps this will be considered pretty critical...
I'm sure this is already on your todo list, but a GUI-based Uninstallation mechanism would be *very* nice. Also, have you considered ways of providing hooks for tying Autopackage into the desktop stuff or the application itself? For instance, I'm thinking if a user could right-click on the program icon, or the application menu, and have options to "Upgrade"/"Uninstall"/"Reinstall"/"Package Info" etc. it could give a much better user-friendly package management solution than is available in *NIX or Windows currently. Extra slick would be if it could detect when the user deletes the application entry from their desktop menu and prompt if they want to just remove the icon link, or uninstall the program entirely (in which case the icon only is removed if the uninstall was successful).
Finally a more general question - say you're an ISV and want to provide an Autopackage version of your software for use on any Linux distro. How "hard" will this be for a company that doesn't know Autopackage? What considerations will they need to take into account? Would they need to identify/provide packages for sub-dependencies themselves? What documentation would you point such an ISV at?
Thanks, Bryce
On Sat, 29 May 2004, Mike Hearn wrote:
I'm a muffin - I just discovered the inkscape install was broken for about a week due to version mismatches (when we released 0.5.1 I rebuilt inkscape but not its dependencies).
Could you do the xhost + thing and try again please? Make sure you've cleared up anything in /tmp and /dev/shm first ...
thanks -mike
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