installer improvements

[Tim McDaniel]

On Tue, 6 Apr 2010, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> That's a little harsh.  We'll gladly look at patches which improve
> setup.exe but it's not likely that we'll be interested in making
> interface changes just because someone makes assertive statements
> about the UI.

Hrm.  Can I nevertheless put in a comment?

Yesterday, as I mentioned on this list, I was fooling around with
packages qt3 and qt3-doc.  In setup.exe, at one point, I clicked on
qt3 until it was Skip.  I then clicked on qt3-doc's New value
repeatedly to reach Uninstall, but on the first click (Reinstall, I
think), setup.exe put qt3 back to being installed.  The only reason I
noticed is because there's only one row between them.  If the
dependency were off in lib*, for example, I would have been thwarted.

So two thoughts come to my mind.

(1) Why do the docs depend on the package?  While it's unlikely, it's
     possible that someone wants the documentation to be handy on their
     own machine (convenient access, for example) when the real package
     is installed on another.  For a similar example, I tend to do BAT
     file work on a production machine, but my browser and bookmarked
     help links are on my desktop.

(2) I was annoyed that it silently included a package, and more, that
     it silently undid an action.  I'm not entirely sure of what the
     best fix would be.  Maybe if, when clicking Next, it would pop up
     a dialog box listing unmet dependencies and ask whether they
     should be included?

-- 
Tim McDaniel, tmcd@panix.com

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