louie@sayshell.umd.edu (Louis A. Mamakos) (06/01/91)
Speaking of the Installer application, there's some features that would be real nice to add to it, from the standpoint of someone trying create and distribute a package. You need to do more than just add/overwrite and delete files when installing or removing a package. What would really be nice is being able to run a program/shell script supplied with the package before and after the Install or Remove operation is performed. This is handy for a way of automatically modifing existing files, like /etc/rc.local to start a new daemon at boot time, for instance. For instance, if you are delivering a product that requires a loadable kernel device driver, how do you arrange to have the /etc/kern_loader.conf file updated? You can't just replace it because the user might have already modified it. You can't use /usr/etc/kl_util to load it, since that's not present on the Standard system. So you have to have your own application load it itself. Sure, its doable, but sort of ugly. It would also be nice if the BOM file would also keep some signature for each file so you could tell if all of the files in the distribution were intact or not. Perhaps you could use the MD4 algorithm to compute the signature? And it would be nice if there were documented hooks for the Preference application so that Third Party applications could add their own preferences panels to configure their packages. louie