Re: An idea for a CGI

[William Merriam <william@apisdn.com>]

D. Jean Franco Martini el Segundo <jfm2@club-internet.fr> wrote:
>
>William Merril

You keep calling me that. My name is still Merriam. :) 

The essence of my suggestion is a single package with a script designed to
be installed directly after installation of Red Hat 5.1 (with the default
selection of packages). The principle is to keep it very simple: it knows
only how to install its few RPMs on an untouched Red Hat 5.1 installation,
and perhaps carry out some extra configuring not done by the RPMs.

It is not so much an idea as a suggestion as to what we should do next.
This stage is important. If I can't install a useful and representative
part of my product for you on your computer, I have no business wasting
your time telling you how good it is. Eudora Pro wouldn't be where it is
today if Eudora Light took hours to install and configure. Regardless of
the quality of the RPMs, a newcomer to Independence could spend hours
reading, choosing, downloading, wrestling with dependencies and fiddling
with configuration files, and could still fail to get anything interesting
to work.

Actually I suggested a client-side program for downloading the package. I
can't see how a CGI script would help for this kind of package. In any
case, I am not a fan of Netscape's approach to upgrading - or Microsoft's.