Definitely NOT based on RPM thank you!
For a start it needs to be a two part installer because of the very wide range of hardware that people use.
I would think the first part would use PCI to find out what hardware was available and then give the person installing the opportunity to go with that or to tweak what is found (like excluding components that are known to cause problems).
The second part would give the opportunity to just go ahead and install (dump everything in one very large partition) or to select exactly where different components are to go including making and formatting the necessary partitions.
In other words a very upgraded version of the old IBM installer with additions to allow installing other programs as well.
Also there should be an option to boot into a very simple maintenance desktop on the DVD.
I think its time the people in the community stop having this negative attitude towards YUM.
It makes no sense. Yeh it has issue's but problems can and should be fixed.
One thing I can tell is that plenty of people still use OS/2 and eCS. At the last OS/2 user group meeting I bumped into 2 people who had no clue how to update Firefox. While David Yeo (thanks for doing that!), makes WPI avaliable to install the required DLL's. But they simply do not know! They wanted to ditch OS/2 because the web browser does not work.
Does issue's the community should be more concerned about instead of mentioning YUM/RPM is evil does not work. What ever negative feelings people have. Issue's are around to be fixed and resolved.
So if you do not like YUM come up with an alternative and start coding.
The current eCS installer I worked on for years at Mensys is also just house a cards.
What I mean with that is that it uses CID in the background (behind the graphical installer). But realy down below it still runs all off the seperate old IBM installers. Its a real pitty IBM never backported the installer of the power PC to the Intel based OS/2 version. From what I understood it was ONE installer backend for the WHOLE OS.
The intel version has RSPINST, MPTS, PEER, TCPINST, MINSTALL just to name a few. eCS adds on Warpin.
The eCS installer is pretty good and most problems have been taken out. That said because of the legacy installers from IBM. No central database is around that tells the OS what files are installed.
And updates via the internet that take into account what other packages are needed YUM/RPM only provides so far. So people can wish away YUM/RPM but what can we then use as an aletrnative ?
Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE