Re: spatial stuff detail

[Guido Schimmels <guido schimmels freenet de>]

Am 22.09.2003 03:04:40 schrieb(en) Sean Middleditch:
> On Sun, 2003-09-21 at 19:17, John Siracusa wrote:
> > On Sep 21, 2003, at 6:41 PM, Sean Middleditch wrote:

> Which is the point - Linux is more pluggable, and thus less "stable,"
> meaning the app folders don't really work that well in comparison.
> Even
> the simplest of apps in Linux is going to require a couple
> dependencies
> that a basic system probably wouldn't have.  Unless you start saying

What is a basic system? I've installed RHat-8.0 as Workstation/ 
Developer. /usr/lib alone is 650M big. On the other hand I've assembled  
a system which take only 300M alltogether (without devel-stuff). On  
this system you can install *any* application for Gnome2, KDE3, Tcl/Tk,  
Motif as a single Application directory with no external dependencies  
whatsoever. The truth is the number of popular libraries is really  
small. 90% of the libraries out there are only being used by 1-3  
applications. The sane thing to do is to bundle them with the appdir.  
you might end up with 2-3 copies of the same library on your disk. So  
what? You won't lose disk space when you link it in statically, because  
the apps will only link in a certain percentage of the library each,  
and you can strip-all the executable - not the shared library. Memory  
usage will go up only very rarely either, because most of the less  
ubicitous libs are domain specific. How many media-players, MUA's,  
games, word processors... do you run simultaneously? More than one of  
each category? Dependency hell is largely a problem of packagers not  
seeing the forrest for all the trees.


Appdirs won't work well with "anything goes" distros like Debian or  
Gentoo. You are absolutely right about this. But that's their problem.  
Distro's aimed at the end-user or corporate desktop are no longer like  
this but increasingly focused. This is true for the "big three", but  
even more so for upstarts like Xandros, Lindows, Lycoris. You may hate  
this. But this is the future of Linux. Or it doesn't deserve to gain a  
considerable share of the pie.

I'm not the blind talking about color. I've packaged ca. 150 mostly  
Gnome based apps as appdirs. And most of them __relocatable__ no less.  
Meaning you can drop them anywhere you please on your HD, like your  
home dir if you have no root privileges. Of course due to the hackish  
ad-hoc approach most Gnome apps take to resource finding, I had to  
modify the sources to overcome the Unix-head hard-wiring madness.
Notable exceptions are GIMP and Abiword which are cleanly programmed.
KDE has library calls for resource finding so KDE apps are relocatable  
out of the box, unless the programmer does something stupid.