Usr Move - More, Please

[Mike Pinkerton]

On 30 Jan 2012, at 10:01, Emanuel Rietveld wrote:

> 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!


If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that a third party  
app marketplace, offering both open source and proprietary apps,  
would maintain multiple repos for apps based on distro, version and  
arch, and then implement the download of the appropriate version by  
utilizing the existing package management system, making apps part of  
the system's managed software.

To make something like that viable, your app marketplace would  
probably also need to provide a packaging infrastructure to app  
developers that would enable them to build packages for all covered  
distros, versions and archs without actually having to learn each of  
the packaging systems.


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



What you can do, however, is recognize that, if given the  
opportunity, your user base will download and install "app" type  
programs, and that it would be better to provide an appropriate place  
within the file system to place those apps.  My suggestion -- which  
assumed that apps would not be managed by the package management  
system (because users will do what users do) -- was that an  
appropriate place would segregate "app" type programs from both  
managed software and locally-compiled software.  Segregation would  
make housekeeping easier given the different update and back-up  
strategies that might be appropriate for "app" type programs.

To return to your suggestion, but modify it a bit, perhaps there  
needs to be an unified interface for downloading, installing and  
launching "app" type programs that would (1) know where in a  
particular distro's file system they should be installed, and (2)  
provide easy access to "app" type programs from whichever GUI the  
user employs.


-- 
Mike Pinkerton
the Kool-Aid tastes great