Re: Gnome/Linux Application Installer

[David Jeske <jeske home chat net>]

On Wed, Dec 23, 1998 at 04:57:44PM -0700, Jason Nordwick wrote:
> My concerns.
> 
> 1. Gnome is not only GNU/Linux, what about the BSDs and other Free systems?

Agreed.. that's why the proposal I made is doable on all unicies. It's
patterened after the nextstep solution which was done on BSD.

> 2. All current packages systems are bad for a standard.  There should be a
> waiting period to see what the next generation will being us, with a
> published deadline (or approximation) for candidates to be done.  FreeBSD
> Inc. is paying people to redesign the package and ports system that people
> have had very good reviews by everybody that uses them.

I don't think the package system is the problem. The original UNIX
design was never designed to handle apps with lots of datafiles. Most
early unix apps were just a binary and a man page. Now that we have
large apps with their own datafiles, we need to rethink how we want to
handle storing and launching those apps. Package systems will fall
into place after we fix this problem.

If you don't agree with what I said above, consider that no amount of
package system magic will fix the fact that applications in UNIX have
no way (presently) to find out where they were installed. Until we fix
the _applications_ (by fixing the standard libraries) package managers
are helpless.

-- 
David Jeske (N9LCA) + http://www.chat.net/~jeske/ + jeske@chat.net