I don't think the comment about RPMs is true, Michael. RPMs are as close as you get to painless installs in the RedHat/Mandrake world, and the RPMs put together for 3.x allow for just dropping everything in and firing up a new instance.
We do of course need windows installers if we do indeed succeed with native Windows support. Mac OS X ... I wonder if anyone here knows anything about standard installs for that platform?
Roberto - we should load up all the existing packages that we distribute as part of the tarball and dump them in the installed /packages directory. The APM will take over from there. What I meant was that I don't see any need to track interpackage dependencies, etc, at the RPM level. The APM will make sure the right stuff's installed and will sort out dependencies.
I don't think we want to autoload all packages because it takes a long, long time to do so due to the reference data that's bundled in.
Timezones in particular. We've talked about bulk loading of that data but it's never happened and if it does, it will be for a future release.
