[rescue] NeWS

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Fri, 24 Feb 2006 @ 10:06 +0000, Peter Corlett said:

> Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:
> [...]
> > Like I said, UNIX has no installation system yet.
> 
> http://aptitude.sourceforge.net/

A package manager like apt, rpm, or tgz might be part of it, but it isn't
all of it. They currently do almost nothing to protect the system against a
malicious package, and other problems.

Well, to be fair, some of them try and are being changed.

Windows provides an install system that (they claim) can allow nonpriv users
to do software installs, and it is supposed to protect the system. That was
one of their bragging points about 2000 and XP.

The problem is most vendors write their own installers that need to run
directly with admin privs.

Ideally an install system would control where every file went.

You couldn't install over a kernel because it simply would not put a file
there, period, end of story.

There is a huge difference between an installer which is just basically
a program which runs as root, and an installer that follows a set of
instructions and checks them for validity.

Windows is supposed to provide the latter, but it doesn't entirely work.

The package managers in UNIX are a better idea to me, but they don't 
go far enough.

Now with new features like jails and similar functions, it should be
easier to enforce the rules of an install system.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["Castles are sacked in war, Chieftains are
scattered far, Truth is a fixed star, Eileen aroon!" -- Gerald Griffin]