Dohickey Alpha 0.5

[David Zeuthen]

On Sun, 2007-03-04 at 12:59 -0500, Martin Owens wrote:
> Hello All,
> 
> I'm struggling a bit making sure the client for the Dohickey project
> works on machines other than Ubuntu Edgy and also I've had people
> asking me about updates and so forth so today I release a client alpha
> which can be downloaded at sourceforge:
> https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=177020
> 
> I invite you all to download it and cause it problems and let me know
> via bug tracker.

So I tried this out; here are some observations

 - It would be nice not having to 'make install' to try this. Running
   software from the checked out directory is nice and a lot of people
   get turned off by doing 'make install' as it might screw up their
   system.

   Look e.g. at the ./run-hald.sh scripts for example (yes, it requires
   some mocking with paths and whatnot). You can run something as
   complex as HAL (with tons of helpers etc.) without 'make install'.

 - tarball with released files should unpack files in <name>-<version>,
   not just <name>

 - you should use $DESTDIR - without this it's hard to package as RPM or
   DEB's. There's probably some python magic to do all this for you.

 - "We regret that Dohickey can only be run in administrator mode."

   I'm unsure why you'd even want to run a client for collecting 
   hardware information as root? I haven't read through your code
   but if you need information HAL can give you just ask for it.

 -  When trying to run it: could not find glade file
    '/home/doctormo/SVN/dohickey_client/do.glade'

 - Unsure also why you need configuration files at all. And especially
   system-wide ones.

Anyway, hope this helps. Thanks.

     David