[haiku-development] Re: software organization/installation

Am Montag, den 16.02.2009, 13:03 +0100 schrieb Christian Packmann:
> Francisco Castro:
> > You'll need a package management system if you want to list which 
> > application 
> > you've got installed, 
> 
> No, just a standardized way of registering installed applications. Windows 
> uses this, and it works well in principle. My main gripe with the Windows 
> implementation (in XP) is that you can't search/limit the displayed list of 
> programs effectively, which is a nuisance on a system with many applications.

You're right. These are two different ways for achieving more or less
the same goal.

Here is the difference I see:
With the "Windows way" the app developer/packager needs to take care to
write some installer app, that does this job of registering and
unregistering on (un)installation. This is what, from what I
experienced, does not work at all on Windows. If you accidently manually
remove the software and then see that it's in the installed software
list, often enough you have no chance to get it out there because the
installer is buggy and doesn't handle this and other user errors.

With the "package manager way", the developer just creates the package
and the pm does the rest. One less thing the dev needs to care about.
One more thing that's consistent throughout the system.

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