[mythtv] Making MythTV more OSX Friendly
Patrick Tescher
pat2man at gmail.com
Tue Jan 25 13:42:00 EST 2005
You have some good points, but I think there are serious benifits to
doing it both ways:
> - If they aren't bundled, you need an installer instead of a
> drag-and-drop application. That also requires authentication, which is
> one of my least favorite consequences of installers.
There are a lot of applications out there that use installers. I would
say more than 50%. Users are pretty used to using an installer and it
does not necessarily require authentication, it can install in the
user's home folder just fine.
> - If the user removes them, the application will fail with no friendly
> error message, just the system crash dialog. Not a good user
> experience.
First of all, if the user starts deleting things in their frameworks
folder they will have a broken system. Second, the application should
never do this, regardless of libraries. Some sort of gui is needed in
case something else goes wrong.
> - If a different version of a library is installed in the same place,
> you could get random crashes due to incompatibilities, and MythTV gets
> unfairly labeled as buggy.
This is true and a good reason to keep the frameworks private,
although in theory there would be no need to install a different
version, it would already be there.
> - It makes it harder for the user to uninstall. If it's not in one
> bundle, then they aren't sure if everything is cleaned up. If you have
> an uninstall script, it could remove something in use by another
> application. Either way, it's more of a hassle than dragging
> MythFrontend.app to the trash.
Um... ~/.mythtv ? I doubt most users will know how to delete that, and
in either case, the frameworks could be used by other apps, they would
do just fine staying where they are.
I really hate to use Microsoft for this example but their Office
Installer is great. It comes on a disk and you can either do a full
install by dragging the application to your HD, or you can run the
installer application which lets you chose where to put it and what
gets installed. Might be a good idea, especially since it would let
user's choose which plugins they want installed (people without a DVD
player for instance would not want MythDVD installed).
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