Checkbox for "Install Everything"

Tim ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au
Mon May 21 07:18:52 UTC 2007


On Sun, 2007-05-20 at 19:33 -0400, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> How about making the "complete install" button do exactly that?  Then
> the people who want the button would have it, so would have no cause
> to complain. 

As it gets occasionally pointed out.  It never did install everything,
and can't.  It's unavoidable that some things don't go together.

You could label the button "install almost everything," but there'd be
someone who'd bitch that it doesn't install everything, or doesn't
install what they want.

One reasonably understandable alternative was to have presettable groups
(install office software, install internet software, etc.).  That did
let users install gobs of stuff in a fairly predictable manner.

Any programmer that insists that they need everything installed for them
in a one-button manner has to be a twit, for a number of reasons:

      * Of all people, they ought to be able to handle installations.
      * They end up writing programs that need masses of stuff
        installed, because they were used to a system full of stuff, and
        never noticed masses of dependencies (or large dependencies for
        what should be small programs).
      * Few users really do use everything.  Just having it installed
        doesn't make it a lot more likely that they will, either.  Lots
        of installed things don't have documentation or intuitive menu
        entries, or any menu entries.  You'd never know some of them
        were there, or what they were for, nor use them.

-- 
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