is there any reason installing publican would fail?

[Tommy Trussell]

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 1:37 PM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> wrote:
>
>  a friend dropped me a note and reported that when he installed the
> publican publishing package, he needed to install some additional
> debian packages, but didn't provide any more detail.
>
>  i just installed it and i saw nothing wrong so what could he have
> meant?  (still waiting to hear back.)  could he mean additional debian
> packages to support additional, optional features?  if anyone else has
> installed it, was there anything untoward or incomplete about that
> install that you noticed?  so far, i see nothing out of sorts so i'm a
> bit puzzled.
>
> rday

If this person installed a publican package that was already compiled
for Debian then it's very possible it is not compatible. The packages
need to be compiled to match the distro (Ubuntu, presumably, or
whatever version of Debian your friend is running).

This person may be coming from a Windows world and may not be aware of
the easy ways to install software in Ubuntu. He may have downloaded
the package and double-clicked it, which of course will attempt to
install it, but it might not be right for his system.

Ubuntu users get much faster results going through the standard Ubuntu
repositories, and if they are installing a package from Universe, they
may have the best success using the Synaptic Package Manager, as may
show other optional "suggested" packages available to go with a
particular package.

(I avoided using the terms "right" and "wrong" with software
installation, because of course your friend could get a SOURCE package
from Debian or another source, and compile the package for his own
machine. But I daresay that would require a higher level of commitment
and tenacity than just using the standard Ubuntu packages, which are
very easy to use once you know where to look.)