Usr Move - More, Please

[Emanuel Rietveld]

On 01/30/2012 03:38 PM, Mike Pinkerton wrote:
>
> You might not want to encourage the "app" model, but that boat already 
> left the dock.  For Linux distros to be players on portables and 
> desktops, they need to recognize that there is an appetite among the 
> user base for "app" type programs that are easy to install 
> (drag-and-drop).  By bundling most of their dependencies, "app" type 
> programs become one way to create a cross-distro "app" marketplace.  
> If we end up with separate "app" marketplaces for Fedora, SUSE, 
> Debian, Ubuntu, et alios, they are all going to languish.  On the 
> other hand, a single "app" marketplace for mainstream Linux distros 
> might well prosper.
>

Unifying package management across distros would a Good Thing (tm). Once 
there's a unified interface to the package management system, you can 
envision things like app marketplaces that simply instruct the 
distribution to install that distribution's package of a particular app. 
Clicking "Firefox" would do "yum install firefox" on fedora and "apt-get 
install firefox" on Ubuntu. Let us do everything in our power to make 
this happen!

Two things that are not a good thing

- Installing software outside of the package management system (instead, 
get the package included in fedora or rpmfusion)
- Statically linked libraries or 'bundled' libraries (See: 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:No_Bundled_Libraries )

As for propietary software, there's nothing the open source community 
can do to influence the design decisions of proprietary software vendors.