3rd party app installation guidelines

Posted by: TheAmigo

3rd party app installation guidelines - 12/02/2003 21:40

We've touched on the subject before, but we haven't actually come up with official guidelines. I've got a few ideas, but mostly I want to see what everyone else thinks would be good ways to do things.

Ideally, it'd be nice if we could come up with a set of guidelines that any developer should follow. The goals I'm thinking of are:
- Software installation should be easy for the non-technical (as automatic as possible)
- Installs should require little intervention (if any) after a player software upgrade
- Log installs to a central place so installations can have dependencies
- Uninstall should be possible for programs that launch at startup

I'm all in favor of the package installer idea being added to jemplode. I'm not proposing anything that would replace that. Rather, until we have that in place, we can start some good practices and when that's available, the transition should be smoother.

Speaking of which, the jemplode site seems to be down... anyone heard from mschrag lately?

Anyway, what do you all think?

I'll start with the following:
/usr/local/bin for binaries
/usr/local/lib for libraries
/usr/local/etc for settings
/usr/local/etc/appdb as a file that would have a list of which apps are installed including some extra info like date installed and version, maybe URL to find updates, etc.

That would make it easier to install something like emphatic since it could check for preinit and add a startup script automatically.

If a user wants, they can make /usr/local a symlink to where they like, but would be advised to keep it on a music partition.

Comments?
Posted by: cushman

Re: 3rd party app installation guidelines - 13/02/2003 07:51

I like this idea a lot better than a /programs partition.

I will begin to mount /dev/hda2 at /usr/local, and any app of mine will be installed there...

Others can symlink /usr/local to their /programs dir.