On 30 Jan 2012, at 10:01, Emanuel Rietveld wrote:
On 01/30/2012 03:38 PM, Mike Pinkerton wrote:
You might not want to encourage the "app" model, but that boat
already left the dock. For Linux distros to be players on
portables and desktops, they need to recognize that there is an
appetite among the user base for "app" type programs that are easy
to install (drag-and-drop). By bundling most of their
dependencies, "app" type programs become one way to create a cross-
distro "app" marketplace. If we end up with separate "app"
marketplaces for Fedora, SUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, et alios, they are
all going to languish. On the other hand, a single "app"
marketplace for mainstream Linux distros might well prosper.
Unifying package management across distros would a Good Thing (tm).
Once there's a unified interface to the package management system,
you can envision things like app marketplaces that simply instruct
the distribution to install that distribution's package of a
particular app. Clicking "Firefox" would do "yum install firefox"
on fedora and "apt-get install firefox" on Ubuntu. Let us do
everything in our power to make this happen!
If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that a third party
app marketplace, offering both open source and proprietary apps,
would maintain multiple repos for apps based on distro, version and
arch, and then implement the download of the appropriate version by
utilizing the existing package management system, making apps part of
the system's managed software.
To make something like that viable, your app marketplace would
probably also need to provide a packaging infrastructure to app
developers that would enable them to build packages for all covered
distros, versions and archs without actually having to learn each of
the packaging systems.
As for propietary software, there's nothing the open source
community can do to influence the design decisions of proprietary
software vendors.
What you can do, however, is recognize that, if given the
opportunity, your user base will download and install "app" type
programs, and that it would be better to provide an appropriate place
within the file system to place those apps. My suggestion -- which
assumed that apps would not be managed by the package management
system (because users will do what users do) -- was that an
appropriate place would segregate "app" type programs from both
managed software and locally-compiled software. Segregation would
make housekeeping easier given the different update and back-up
strategies that might be appropriate for "app" type programs.
To return to your suggestion, but modify it a bit, perhaps there
needs to be an unified interface for downloading, installing and
launching "app" type programs that would (1) know where in a
particular distro's file system they should be installed, and (2)
provide easy access to "app" type programs from whichever GUI the
user employs.
--
Mike Pinkerton
the Kool-Aid tastes great
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