Simplifying package installation.

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel gnu org>]

   Last night, Arturo and I were discussing an endemic problem in
Unix: it is very hard for an end-user to install new applications in
Unix.  

   Typically, if a user wants to install a package, they need to get
root privileges to install it.  Yes, RPM helps a lot in this
situation, but it does not address the very very end user problem.

   So it ocurred to me, that we could follow the Nextstep way of doing
things for this.  Application providers could just ship a directory,
say "Gnumeric.App", and all the files required to run Gnumeric: its
data files, its modules, the executable and everything else is inside
this directory.

   A shell script called run would be in there: Gnumeric.App/run and
it would make sure all environment variables are properly setup.  A
Gnumeric.App/dep-libs file could point to the dependencies of the
application.

   The file manager would know how to execute those.

   Now, why is this better?  Because a user only needs to download the
Gnumeric.App.tar.gz and put it on its home directory, we could then
take care of launching it correctly, with no root involved in the
process. 

Miguel.