Deb Installer for Dapper.

On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 05:17 +0200, Ivan Krstic wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-10-23 at 21:49 -0400, Evan Dandrea wrote:
> > I think it is a big deal.  This is an area where we're able to be
> > miles ahead of the proprietary software world.  We can guarantee much
> > better security and protection from the kind of nonsense that Windows
> > users currently face by keeping the package system close to the way
> > it's currently configured.
> 
> I'm in complete agreement with Evan on this.
> 
> John Nilsson wrote:
> > A perfect solution for this class of users would be a nice little nag
> > screen that is activated when you doubble click a .deb .rpm or .tar.gz.
> 
> Putting "perfect solution" and "nag screen" in the same sentence is, at
> best, silly. Years of Windows' abysmal security record have taught us,
> among other things, that when an uninformed user is presented with an
> explanation of how to do the right thing, and the *ability* to do the
> wrong thing, the user will do the wrong thing every single time without
> fail if she believes it's a quicker way towards the end goal ("install
> this piece of software"). As an example, this is why ZoneAlarm is a
> great personal firewall in the hands of a knowledgeable user, but fails
> catastrophically at protecting anyone else.

I failed to communicate my "almost sarcastic" tone in that choice of
words, sorry.


> If you're trying to protect the user by showing them an explanation and
> giving them a choice, you've already failed. Incidentally, Ubuntu's
> repositories don't hold three hundred packages, or five thousand. They
> hold close to eighteen thousand. I think this makes it *perfectly*
> justifiable to not make installing external packages any easier than it
> already is.

No, no, the problem I wanted to highlight is not users trying to install
things not in repositories. It is users not knowing that there is such a
thing as repositories, and wouldn't know to look for synaptic or
gnome-app-install. Even when I try to explain it as an embedded
download.com they fail to grasp what I'm talking about.

IT goes like this:
"So I open the file I downloaded with this... Synaptic?"
"No you don't download, you do everything with synaptic".
"But how do I install this file I downloaded?'
"You don't."
"But..."
An this is the third time I'm trying to explain it to the same user.

For people coming from windows a package repository + package manager is
a very hard thing to imagine.

Regards,
John