On Mon, 14 Apr 2008, Greg Ewing wrote: > John J Lee wrote: >> If you have a network connection, about the only reason for not wanting an >> app to be "installed" is that it has changed the behaviour of your system >> somehow, just by being in the "installed" state. > > If you have a continuous high-speed network connection and > aren't concerned about cost or bandwidth use or disk space > taken up, it might make sense to have apps downloaded on demand,
http://0install.net/faq.html#id2324452 Practically, I suspect the sharing and caching will result in lower network bandwidth usage. I guess practically, that's a matter to be answered mostly by measurement in common usage patterns, rather than by argument. > cached, etc. But not everyone works that way. I don't, much of > the time. I prefer it when downloading an app and putting it > on my system is an explicit step. You'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes ;-) >>> Yes, ROX is very MacOSX-like, but I don't think it has >>> anything to do with 0install. >> >> 0install provides one way of implementing that kind of system. > > But it doesn't, if by "that kind of system" you mean one where > an app or library is just an ordinary filesystem object. A > 0install app appears to be very far from ordinary. Of course, I understand exactly what you mean. But since the answer to those kinds of questions depends on our different ideas of how "an app" or "installed" can most usefully be defined, I guess debating the words here is less profitable than the concepts and their consequences. I genuinely do suspect that the 0install model is simpler to understand than the "unshared directories of files" model (I won't really be confident unless and until I actually use the thing a lot, of course). [...] >>> If ROX apps included a checksum, and the system verified it >>> before running the app, that would give you the same thing >>> trust-wise, I think. >> >> That's an interesting idea, but how would the system find the app? > > The system doesn't have to find the app -- the user finds the > app, using the same techniques he uses to find anything else in > the filesystem he's interested in. In somebody else's user account, right? And the dependencies? And what app is that, anyway? http://0install.net/survey.html """If you don't know the hash, you can't trust it! Making it easy to browse the cache "Hey look - there's the Gimp! Let's run it!" is therefore an anti-goal.""" Of course, you could specify both the app (== URL, or hash, or pet name for it, or something like that) *and* where its data is on the disk, but that's a more complicated and less useful interface. John _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
