Re: [UUG/MLUG] getting Linux to the "million idiots"

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Fri, 10 Dec 1999, Christopher J. Kaiser wrote:

> Assuming your computer is configured correctly, rpm's should make for
> pretty easy program installs.  However, if you needed to go out and get
> and install other packages to meet dependencies, forget it.  And Jason's
> right, unpacking a tar ball and running make would lose a lot of people.

There's an interesting datapoint here, though: most perl modules are
tarballs that you get off of CPAN, then type:

perl Makefile.pl
make
make test
make install

The wild popularity of CPAN suggests that people can be made to do this,
as long as they *don't* have to twiddle with configuration files (perl,
when first installed, does require the twiddly config file stuff, of
course).  On the other hand, what has come up at times are the
possibilities of obscure dependencies between perl modules, and in those
cases you do kind of sometimes wish for better dependency checking (which
you can get via RPMs, as it turns out).
 
jking