> because outside the windows world central package management is the norm > and based on "least privileges" applications must not have the > permissions to change itself
I didn't mean a background update. I meant the user could get a dialog or notification asking them to update, and if they press "yes" they can enter their root password and the app can update itself and restart. > and for each distribution with different dependencies and libraries How does KDE have different dependencies for different distros? (To be honest though, I only mentioned this method because I thought having multiple options would advertise the idea in the second method) > if you don't care for security The security risk is very small, and it can be fixed in a lot of different ways. The app could create a folder that only root can access within the /tmp folder. If even that's not secure enough, the app could create source files with just "#define MAIN_CPP_SOURCE" and compile with "-DMAIN_CPP_SOURCE=[the source code] so that it never has to be stored on the disk before being compiled. > which distribution installs a compiler by default so that one can avoid > touching it? I don't think I've ever used one that *doesn't* come with at least gcc installed. I've tried Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and OpenSUSE. Now that I think about it though, they don't come with g++ installed, and they definitely don't come with Qt headers installed, but they don't take that much space, and maybe they can also just be placed in /tmp and removed after the update. It didn't take me 10 minutes to answer these questions in my head, so I don't see why you're trying to scrap the idea so quickly for its faults instead of trying to fix them. A bit of constructive criticism would be nice. Cheers, Sam