Re: [MiNT] Where should a user put GEM apps

[Jo Even Skarstein <joska@online.no>]

On Mon, 2011-01-10 at 11:12 -0700, Thomas Jürges wrote:

> who does.  There are indeed people who are using package managers, even
> for MiNT, and that should be taken into account.  Don't we want a good
> user experience for everybody?  Then let's not make it harder on the
> user than necessary to install software built to run on MiNT.

I use Ubuntu and Linux Mint on all my PC's. The "Software center" is
probably one of the greatest features about this OS. I wouldn't mind if
something like that existed for FreeMiNT. But why use package managers?
These are needed on unix platforms simply because programs on unix
platforms are spread all over a confusing file hierarchy, and because
virtually every unix program depends on 117 other unix programs. Without
a sophisticated package manager there would be around five unix users
left on the planet.

GEM programs are not like that. They are self-contained, and can be
installed by just extracting an archive or copy a folder. I'd say that's
a lot easier than rpm.

> What user are you thinking of?  rpm -qf Full_Path/File tells you what
> you need to know.  I believe it is a sane assumption to expect a user of
> a 20+ year old computer OS/system to be a little computer-savvy.  Either

I can assure you, the majority of Atari-users have never used rpm. The
#1 argument against MiNT during the 90's (when MagiC was still alive)
was all the command line stuff.

Jo Even