[kde-linux] KDE 3.2.1 after konstruct

[Marc Heyvaert]

Hello James,

--- James Richard Tyrer <tyrerj at acm.org> wrote:
> 
> Konstruct encourages people that have NEVER
> installed anything from source 
> to install KDE from source.  Therefore, instructions
> that are more than 
> sufficient for people that know what they are doing
> are not sufficient for 
> newbies that have no idea what they are doing. 
> These terse instructions 
> are simply not adequate for a newbie:
> 

I agree that a tutorial should be a +, on the other
hand installing from .rpm's is probably already beyond
the capabilities of most newbies and casual users.

If you want to give instructions installing from
source, one has to make so many assumptions about the
state of the installers machine. From my experience,
most distributions don't setup the OS so that
installing KDE/KOffice from source is possible
right-away. A *lot* of -devel packages are generally
*not* installed. There is a script in the Konstrukt
package that checks SuSE distro's IIRC, I remember
using the script and I was amazed of how much was
still lacking on my PC.

Error messages after ./configure can also be helpful,
but for a newbie? I think not.

No, I think that there are limits to what you can
explain to people. Perhaps the KDE community should
concentrate on providing packages for the different
distro's and explain these really well. The last time
I upgraded my KDE, I did this with the .rpm's SuSE
provides. Even this is too complicated IMO for a
newbie. Even wen you follow the instructions (very
terse!
http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/linuks/index.html
and
http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/linuks/i386/update_for_8_2/base.html
) you get tons of dependency problems. I had the
courage to ignore them all and clean up the system
afterwards, and as of today I live with some of the
consequences : I would label my system only 95% stable
and OK.

My point is that a newbie and a casual user will never
continue the installation beyond opening the first
package few packages and reading the
dependency-problem messages that YAST fires at him.

Regards

Marc


	
		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25¢
http://photos.yahoo.com/ph/print_splash