Re: Application bundles in Gnome OS

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2012-09-13 at 18:26 +0100, Nick Glynn wrote:
> 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. 

App directories are not very much different than an image-based bundle.
You can easily mount the image separately and look into it. The main
difference is that other apps needs no modification to work with
single-file bundles, whereas nothing will currently understand app
directories. Additionally, with a custom image format you can do some
special handling, like glick2 does to merge identical files in different
bundles at runtime.

All other advantages/problems with bundling is the same with appdirs and
image-based bundles.