One nice feature would be to have a built-in update system. I am talking about some clean and well thought system that all new apps should standardize to. In other words this should be part of a kit inside the system from the start.
Eclipse for example offers an update system based on some simple XML lines, so that each plugin writer can add his own. This could be a good starting point.
Basically each time you’d click the ‘Update Apps’ button it would check for updates of all (compatible) installed software and allow you to update them.
This would specifically be useful for security fixes as this may become an issue some day in the near future.
The biggest problem with this is the huge amount of traffic this would generate and also the fact that if updates are located on web pages they might as well dissapear (this happens with some eclipse plugins).
Why not be the first OS to use a distributed system for updates? Each haiku/beos user could have a daemon in the background sharing files for other users. This is not an easy or simple task since it involves quite a bit of work and requires a lot of consideration especially on security.
What do you think?
Also, I think there’s a package manager in development at BeClan. Have a glance over at the glass elevator archives and search for “Package RFC”, “Package Thoughts” and “packages – once again…”.