I think that in today's IT world, it's human nature for users to *expect* to have a simple installation vehicle for anything they install on their computers. Whether it be a productivity application, game, or in this case, a DBMS. It's what people are used to in the Windows world.

The problem with this as we've seen from the posts lately, is that the installer is causing more frustration than it's solving. And as with any application, this leads to low confidence in the product from the new user base. It's also human nature (at least where Windows based-applications are concerned) for people to automatically assume the software is flawed because of problems during installation routines, which may not be the fault of the software at all. In the case of the MySQL installer - Is a problem with it? Perhaps, but it could be the configurations of the machines people are trying to install it on. There are a billion different machines with a billion different configurations, but too many people expect that the software should install without a hitch.

I don't mean to offend anyone, but I personally think that the problem is too much expectation on the part of the user base. Too many people expect to just have to click a Next button a few times, and *BAM*, instant DBMS. I think that with something as complex as a DBMS, there should be an expectation to have to do some manual configuration. After all this is where the true power lies - the ability to tweak it just the way you want it. On that note, I think that people must expect that for something as complex as a DBMS, wizards can be more of a hindrance than an asset in certain cases. Anyone who's new to Linux and has ever tried doing an install of the Debian "Woody" distribution likely knows what I'm talking about. Too many questions that they don't really know the answer to, so they just press enter to accept the default.

I also feel (and again, no offense to anyone) that not enough people take the time to read the documentation, and instead just post to the list when they run into a problem, even if the answer is in the documentation. I'm sure we've all seen enough posts of that variety as well. Cheers.

Daniel da Veiga wrote: