Jeff Waugh <j...@perkypants.org> writes:
> <quote who="Daniel Pittman">
>
>> I am curious about the "how to bring AppFolders..." part of your
>> comment, though: as far as I can tell, with the exception of the Rox
>> stuff[1] and the GNUStep people[2] no only really cares ... and those
>> two are pretty much a niche market...
>
> There were heaps of projects playing with the idea a few years ago,
> one of thre notably offensive ones being autopackage.
Dear Lazyweb, please also name the other two projects. KTHXBI.
Seriously, when I looked in response to your comments I didn't track
them down, so I would appreciate if you recall the project names.
As to AutoPackage, one of their key FAQs is (still) "What's wrong with
NeXT style AppFolders?", followed by an explanation of how they suck
and, subsequently, why AutoPackage don't use them.
So, presumably they discussed this internally as part of a discussion on
changing project goals and/or technologies?
> OLPC ".xo" packages are essentially appfolders, too.
I thought they were RPM based. Hmmm. Anyway, thank you for those
pointers.
>> (Plus, how hard is it, seriously? Five lines of code?)
>
> Every time you're tempted to say that, hold it in and realise you
> probably haven't thought about it very much.
Have I mentioned that I actually did some work on both ROX-Filer and
GNUStep in the past, so I actually do have a very firm technical idea of
just how much work is involved?
> It's like when clients say, "it should be easy to..." and suggest
> something that would require major architectural changes to your
> product...
Pshaw. AppFolders are only hard if you want integration with the Unix
world, outside your own environment.
On Linux, this is probably a goal, because otherwise you need to invent
the entire desktop environment, rendering you into stagnation (hi, ROX,
GNUStep, nice to see nothing much changes) because of the workload.
It doesn't make AppFolders themselves even remotely difficult, though,
but rather integrating them into the rest of an environment designed on
different assumptions.
I grant your general point, though.
Regards,
Daniel
Plus, y'know, it isn't like ROX (at least) solved this with an automatic
wrapper script generating tool that make AppFolder contents work like
standard Unix executables...
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