Rick Gigger <rick@alpinenetworking.com> on Thursday, May 31, 2007 at 2:52 PM -0800 wrote:
I'm getting a sense that people who use double-clickable installers are somehow not "our sort of people." Goodness knows we can always use more snobbery ;-)
I wouldn't argue that at all. I would instead argue that MacPorts is simply not READY to serve people who use double-clickable installers. That has always been a design goal of MacPorts, but it's not there yet. It has a ways to go. It doesn't even know how many of its ports even build at a given time yet, much less have them all packaged up and ready to double click on. :-)
I would agree with that. I would say that once you have a binary repository, and a very, very easy to use gui installer, then and only then, is it going to be ready for the average user. Normal people look at the command line like it's some sort of arcane magic. Normal people don't want to take half an hour to compile mozilla from source rather than taking 2 minutes to download it.
If you were installing binaries, and if you had a nice gui, to handle not only installing the software but also to handle seamlessly keeping it up to date, then I think it would be a GREAT tool for your average user. Until then they are going to stick to installing via drag and drop .app folders.
Didn't Steve Jobs once say that the problem of people not being familiar with a keyboard would be "solved by biology"? I sometimes wonder if the pickup rate for Unix skills isn't increasing faster than our ability to provide an alternative for many of the utility type apps for which we have ports. No I'm not being a snob. Installing stuff is difficult and I'd like it as much as anyone, but I can't help but wonder sometimes. Mark