Re: Automatic software installing (like Win. 2000)
On Fri, Aug 27, 1999 at 10:08:25AM +0300, Paul Huygen wrote:
>
> I can imagine another philosophy for automatic package installing. I
> am sure that many people (I myself for instance) have installed many
> more packages than they actually use. For that case I can imagine a
> utility that remembers for each package the latest occasion that it
> has actually been used, and removes the package if it has not been
> used for a specific time. Then, if a user asks for that package, the
> utility re-installs the package from the deb file. In this way the
> system maintainer keeps control on what is installed, what is
> installable and what is not installed and the system is as mean and
> lean as possible. On the other hand, I presume that it is very
> complicated to write a program that tracks the actual use of each installed
> debian package.
Paul -- such a system sort of exists -- the popularity contest package,
which reports via email the most commonly used packages. I haven't a clue
how that thing works, I haven't looked into its source code yet; however, I
think you are absolutely right in one respect -- those seldom used packages,
I installed because I thought they would be cool/useful/neat, whatever -- if
I never use it, I must have forgotten about it. Something to email me a
weekly basis the packages I *didn't* use, might be extremely helpful. Anyone
care to hack apart the populatirty contest package to add this? :)
(For the record, the idea of self-installing software works fine for
office2000 -- most users don't come close to using the whole thing, but it
still shows what is offered. There is an upper limit on what it can do
however, and a full OS is just too big to try to pull that off. *I* would
rather avoid the issue. It works fine for office 2000 since local user ==
root. On multi-user unix systems, as an administrator, I would hate for my
machine to be auto-installing software because my users mistyped. As a
single-user high performance system, normally if I need something, I can su
to root and install it myself. It makes me think once in while if I need a
package or not.. :)
--
Seth Arnold | http://www.willamette.edu/~sarnold/
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