Gallery 2.1
I updated to Gallery 2.1 on one of my Gentoo servers last week. And once again the process was amazingly slick. The Gallery developers have gone out of their way to make the process as seemless as possible. It’s not at the stage where my Mum could install it but given that this is a server-based application, it’s about as close as you can get.
I took the lazy route this time and didn’t bother cleaning up the old files and instead simply copied the new set of files overtop of the old ones. I hate doing this because if there’s any kind of problem with permissions, some new files may not get installed. But not to worry with Gallery 2 because the app not only checks the validity of the files when upgrading, it also checks for old files. At that stage of the install, I was presented with a long list of old files and groaned at the thought of having to delete them all. At least until I read this message on the same page:
These files are no longer part of Gallery. They probably won’t cause any problems but it is a good idea to remove them to keep your install clean. Gallery can’t remove these files for you, but you can download and run this script in your gallery2 directory to delete them for you.
And the word “script” was a link to download a nice shell script which removed all the old files for me. Brilliant. And just when I thought the application couldn’t get any better. So if the Gallery development team are doing this, why can’t more app developers? In most cases it comes down to laziness and the cool factor; it’s just not cool or fun to do that kind of stuff.
Mon, 17 Apr 2006 14:46 Posted in Technology
