Re: post-inst message for autodock
Hello,
Stefano, I got the following comments to our post-install message for the autodock package.
Andreas Tille wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 05:16:46PM +0200, Steffen Moeller wrote:
>> in the sake of our group maintenance I want to inform you about a somewhat unusual
>> post-inst message that I had added to the autodock package, toinform the users that
>> upstream needs funding to maintain their software.
>
> I have very mixed feelings about this because:
>
> - Postinst should not be to noisy.
> - It might not help anyway because the information gets lost.
>
> So I would really love to avoid this even if I understand the reasons of
> upstream clearly.
Andreas has some good points here: the text just flips through your screen and you don't
notice it much - if at all - but for many it is a distraction to the eye that is trained
to spot errors in the install process. And since Andreas is constructive fellow, he
continued as follows:
> What could we do instead.
>
> 1. Having the file in /usr/share/doc/<package> is fine.
> 2. Point to this file in the package description should work even
> better than your solution.
> 3. Referencing the file in the manpage makes noise as well.
he probably meant "less noise" here
> 4. We could even add a comment on the tasks page which makes
> the problem visible for users who did not even installed
> the package.
this would be lovely.
> Please consider these suggestions instead of this clear misuse
> of postinst.
Stefano, would you agree to that? We could also add a note to the startup of the
application to show that text and optionally show this only upon the first invocation of
autodock/autogrid.
Best,
Steffen
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