Re: Migrating from old hierarchy...

[Adam Fedor]

On Friday, June 13, 2003, at 11:08 AM, Nicola Pero wrote:

> Personally I think gnustep-make should not attempt to move the old
> filesystem to the new one automatically.  Running that script looks
> dangerous.
>
> It's generally not very useful anyway, as you have to recompile and
> reinstall everything from scratch when switching from the old one to 
> the
> new one, so the most common solution is probably to do a rm -Rf of the 
> old
> directory, and install a new one from scratch.

Well removing Developer was probably a bad idea. Sorry about that.

You don't have to recompile everything (at least not applications). In 
most cases, the applications will work unchanged. I've tried it on 
several apps.

> I'd say a better solution would be to have gnustep-make's configure 
> print
> out a warning if it detects the old hierarchy, prompting the user to 
> run
> the move-directories script in that case - without taking any action, 
> and
> leaving that choice to the user.
The problem is that there tends to be a huge proliferation of options 
for installation, etc that most users never even know about. I think 
one of the most common complaints is 'where is the documentation for x' 
and most of the time, questions I answer are already answered in the 
documentation...  Another problem is that I hardly even see many 
warnings and notes in configuration of make and base since they scroll 
off the screen before I can read them.

I'd like to try to simplify installation to the point where it just 
does the right thing for the most common user, but allows the expert to 
do more complicated things. Perhaps there should be a warning that it 
WILL move the old structure unless you specifically turn it off.