As a linux user much of my life and an OS X user for the past year, I dearly miss package management. Self-contained bundles are ok as far as they have minimal dependencies besides the existing platform libraries. When you simply bundle everything, you get 100MB+ bundles for pretty much everything and enormous memory usage because of no shared libs.
2009/8/18 Gary C Martin <[email protected]>: > Hi Bert, > > On 18 Aug 2009, at 09:10, Bert Freudenberg wrote: > >> On 17.08.2009, at 23:34, Gary C Martin wrote: >> >>> For the Mac users, it's just "Drag this application to your >>> application folder." Done, end of story. For the worst application >>> offenders (and there are some, usually some of the big corps who can >>> get away with it) the user is asked for their admin password, but >>> this >>> always looks like shoddy, dodgy application development from >>> developers who don't really know what they are doing on a Mac. >> >> Gary, this is highly unfair to Mac developers. >> >> Self-contained bundles can be installed just by drag-and-drop >> indeed. But you need an installer (which might ask for an admin >> password) to integrate with the system, e.g. to install QuickLook >> plugins which generates previews for your documents, or SpotLight >> for indexing. And obviously the "big corps" do define their own >> document types, and want them to integrate with the system. Users >> expect them to. >> >> E.g., Etoys needs an installer on the Mac to put its web browser >> plugin in the right library folder. It does nothing "evil", the main >> app could as well be installed by drag-and-drop, but we can't expect >> everyone to manually install the plugin. Also, the plugin needs to >> know where to find the app so we must require the app to be >> installed into /Applications. And once we have a QuickLook plugin we >> will need to install that too. Now you may call Etoys development >> "shoddy and dodgy" all you like, but please blame it for its actual >> faults. > > Hmmm.... Sorry Bert, but pretty sure everything you mention above > (QuickLook, SpotLight indexing, file document types/icons, web > plugins) for can go in the users ~/Library with absolutely no need to > request admin permissions for the whole system (affecting all users). > > I agree you might want to use an installer rather than drag and drop, > though first run of an App could put these extras in place as needed. > As for hard-coding a path to /Applications, you can ask the system to > tell you the path to the application bundle, but if I remember, there > are a few cases where even Apple slips up on this one (and I'm sure > causes no end of bug reports and support calls for Apple when folks > system upgrade after moving such an Application) – so I won't diss you > too much for that hack ;-) > > Also as an alternitive, if you have control of the file format bundle, > QuickLook previews and SpotLight indexes can also live there, though I > understand that you'll likely want to keep with an existing cross- > platform file format that can't take advantage. > > So I'd say Etoys could just be a single drag'n'drop Mac application > into Applications folder (that does it's extras on first run, MS Mac > apps do this quite a bit), or at the very least a regular package > installer with no need for the admin password. > > Apologies for the off list topic reply. > > Regards, > --Gary > > P.S. So, can I have a job now making Etoys truly Mac friendly ;-) > > _______________________________________________ > Sugar-devel mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel > _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
