Sunday, March 04, 2007

How many times do we miss things

How often when installing software do we automatically know that extra things are needed?
How often do report this as a bug to developers?

I noticed this with a few packages in Ubuntu recently. You know when installing certain packages that unless you enable a certain other package or libraries that you don't get a complete package. An example of this is checkgmail unless you install libcrypt-simple-perl you can only save the password in plain text but unless you try this you would never know.

So please let the developers know when you hit these issues, as they are not technically bugs but they are more annoying for new users than can be believed. If you don't know that there is a package needed for something, you don't install it. The down side being that if it isn't installed the program doesn't function the way you expect.