Re: Resource framework, relocatability (was Re: Glib: a Win32 discussion)

[Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>]

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 1:34 PM, Damjan Jovanovic <damjan jov gmail com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 7:17 PM, Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 5:03 AM, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com> wrote:
>>
>>> In a specialized setup where you are in control of everything is
>>> certainly possible. But in an osx scheme where the user just drops an
>>> executable file somewhere it doesn't just work. You'd need something
>>> like the the osx launch services to handle it.
>>
>> all sounds terribly reasonable, with one fatal flaw ... it *is*
>> working for us right now, on linux (and various bsd's and solaris and
>> ...)
>>
>> --p
>
> It "*is*" working only in a very limited way. All package managers
> today need root access to install software, which is a security risk
> (downloading a DEB from the Internet and double-clicking it allows
> arbitrary code execution, as root). Also, eg. students won't have root
> access on their school/university PC, making distro packages
> completely useless. Installing multiple versions of a package is often
> impossible because they're not relocatable. Portable apps for Linux
> virtually don't exist. Those are just 4 examples among numerous
> others.

you're going way beyond what i was responding to alexandre about. the
original question was:

> Also, apps that consume such files are also hard to relocate. Take
> nautilus for instance, it looks for extensions
> in /usr/lib64/nautilus/extensions-3.0/, but if you relocate it, how does
> extensions know where to install extensions?

i wasn't referring to anything involving package managers.

portable apps for linux do exist, but i agree that they are rare. we
could get into a very long discussion about why that is, but this
doesn't seem like the right place for it (even though GTK's handling
of run-time located- and loaded- resources is part of the issue for
GTK-using apps). i have some strong opinions about it myself, and
recently switched my primary project to portable/self-contained
status.

--p