I’ve see the idea of a package manager for Haiku, but is this a good solution for installing applications? It seems like the dependency hell on modern Linux systems… Now Haiku can install programs a-la- OSX, drag and dropping the program installer into the program forlder… Is this a better (and clean) way of installation?
The OSX “application” that you drop into the Applications folders is actually a disguised directory. Which means it can contain all sorts of libraries, scripts, graphics etc. Not the worst way to distribute software, although it does mean you use a lot more disk space than you need to.
But even OSX has another way to distribute software: self-extracting and installing packages. These are mostly used for utilities like Onyx that need to write to the system directories.
I believe the OSX way of distributing software to be too bloated (FAT ELF binaries and what-not) and much prefer software repositories but let’s see where this discussion goes.
I see, but it can bring more people for the apparently easiness of the installation process.
Litte OT: in my mind, OS X is the Apple idea of BeOS, they chose Next for its Unix-like kernel (more programs / developers than BeOS platform) and recreate the easeness of BeOS from that basis.
Fat binaries? I’ve heard that with the ultimate OS version (Snow Leopard) they stripped the PPC part from the binaries… For the repositories: yes they are a easy and convenient way to install software, but the dependency hell are behind doors
Well there’s nothing preventing you from distributing self contained software packages in a repository, right?
What I wish for in application distribution is that applications don’t pollute the entire file system with their files. IMO an app’s binaries and static data should stay in one folder, related saves and user data goes in the user’s home folder and temporary data in the system temp folder. Nice and clean, but one would have to think up some way for applications to make their services known to the OS for integration, that doesn’t involve a bloated and chaotic registry.
The binary type is Mach O, not ELF. Just thought I’d clrear that up.
Yes, the PPC binarys are going to be removed from the Fat Binarys, but in their place comes 64bit binarys. That doesn’t mean every software distributor is going to remove the PPC part, you can have all 3 distributed.
@fhein - Theres nothing stopping people from doing that, it’s just a rather extreme addition of work to do on UNIX, and usually results in cross-platform issues. Windows is a good example of what your ideal was… was that is. After all, look at how much the registry was abused, it no suprise the filesystem was distorted too.
An idea about the central organization of libraries:
1-/boot/system/lib: shared system libraries;
2-/boot/home/username/lib: shared user libraries;
3-/boot/(programdir)/(appdir)/lib: program’s libraries;
When an application starts, it can look for its libraries in the its program folder (3), then in the user shared libraries dir (2), else in the shared system libraries dir (1)
Uh… isn’t that basically how it works already?
[quote=umccullough]
Uh… isn’t that basically how it works already?[/quote]
Lol so that’s a good idea