Re: Application bundles in Gnome OS

[Nick Glynn <exosyst+gnomeos gmail com>]

Hey Alex,

Is there anything preventing something like the Application Directory idea that was used in RiscOS and I think still used in ROX?


The situation would be where you have a gnome Applications directory
 that is treated in such a way that a subdirectory '!MyApp' is presented
 as MyApp - such that the pling is hidden - with an icon 
!MyApp/MyApp.svg shown instead of the standard folder picture and double
 clicking it launches !MyApp/!Run. Under the !MyApp directory could be 
all the relevant libraries that aren't part of GnomeCore and resources. 

I only suggest this to increase the openness of the system - imagine
 a curious developer diving into the code by just opening !MyApp (the 
RiscOS way was to hold shift and double-click) and looking at the 
structure, resources, Python scripts etc.

Just an idea if the goal is to make a fresh break from the status quo for Gnome apps.

Regards,
Nick

On 13 September 2012 18:01, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com> wrote:

On Thu, 2012-09-06 at 13:08 -0400, Alexander Larsson wrote:

> I don't think glick2 is a perfect fit as is. It has some weak aspects,
> like the lack of sandboxing and an over-reliance on fuse (with
> possible performance/robustness/security issues), and some strong ones
> (support for integrating apps with the desktop (desktop files,
> mimetypes, etc) and in-memory deduplication of files). I'd like to
> hear some implementation details on what Lennart has been looking at
> though. Maybe we can merge the best from both worlds. See [1] for
> techincal details on Glick2.

I just wrote a different, extremely minimal approach to a bundling
system:

https://github.com/alexlarsson/bundler

It basically just loopback mounts a squashfs file in a private mount
namespace in a hardcoded place and execs a hardcoded binary name from
it. There is no desktop integration and no other flexibility, although
things like that *could* be introduced by a separate daemon that
extracts metadata from "installed" bundles.

Not sure this is exactly what we want either, but it might be
interesting to compare and contrast.

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