Richard O'Keefe wrote:
On 21 Apr 2009, at 2:10 pm, Edward Middleton wrote:
Using non-standard installation methods makes it harder for package maintainers to package the application and suggests you haven't taken any care / don't care about making global installation safe.
I'm sorry, there is no such animal as "safe" global installation, in the sense of "download this one package and do what it says."
Well I have been doing that for more then 10 years, it is one of the functions any decent package management systems is designed to do.
ghc 6.8.3 is /usr/bin/ghc on my office Mac, but nothing in the world prevents there being some other program called ghc that would also like to be there. Only by painstaking verification of a whole bunch of applications together can one be confident of "safety".
Well then I guess we agree, so the question becomes who should do the painstaking verification. I think distribution maintainers should do this, you think end users who can't compile source packages should do this. Edward