"Richard O'Keefe"
Some of the right questions are - how many potential <whatever> users would need to have <whatever> installed on _some_ machine they do NOT have administrator access to?
Irrelevant.
- if people find Mac and Windows installers that show you where something is going to be put and offer you the chance to change it acceptable, why exactly would that be unacceptable under Linux or Solaris?
It's perfectly acceptable, even required, but, for the love of UNIX, take that path as a parameter, don't do a GUI. If you want a GUI, write it in terms of that script.
- since we know install-anywhere binary releases are possible, and since we know that an installer _can_ probe to see whether installation in /usr/local (or any other "standard" place) is possible, why not do it?
I really, really don't like the idea of a program behaving differently based on the permissions it has, short of failing to do what I told it to do. OTOH, quickly checking whether the user has write permissions to / and failing with "you need root right to do that, did you mean to call this script with --user?" instead of failing with access denied errors is a Good Thing.[1] Echoing "binaries were installed in $HOME/.cabal/bin", and checking the user's $PATH and displaying a warning if that directory isn't in it is a Good Thing, too. I guess it's also the main problem those not literate in UNIX have with cabal. [1] Does install --user check whether configure was called with --user, too? I hope so... -- (c) this sig last receiving data processing entity. Inspect headers for copyright history. All rights reserved. Copying, hiring, renting, performance and/or quoting of this signature prohibited.