On Mon, 14 Apr 2008, Greg Ewing wrote:
John J Lee wrote:
If you have a network connection, about the only reason for not wanting an app to be "installed" is that it has changed the behaviour of your system somehow, just by being in the "installed" state.
If you have a continuous high-speed network connection and aren't concerned about cost or bandwidth use or disk space taken up, it might make sense to have apps downloaded on demand,
http://0install.net/faq.html#id2324452 Practically, I suspect the sharing and caching will result in lower network bandwidth usage. I guess practically, that's a matter to be answered mostly by measurement in common usage patterns, rather than by argument.
cached, etc. But not everyone works that way. I don't, much of the time. I prefer it when downloading an app and putting it on my system is an explicit step.
You'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes ;-)
Yes, ROX is very MacOSX-like, but I don't think it has anything to do with 0install.
0install provides one way of implementing that kind of system.
But it doesn't, if by "that kind of system" you mean one where an app or library is just an ordinary filesystem object. A 0install app appears to be very far from ordinary.
Of course, I understand exactly what you mean. But since the answer to those kinds of questions depends on our different ideas of how "an app" or "installed" can most usefully be defined, I guess debating the words here is less profitable than the concepts and their consequences. I genuinely do suspect that the 0install model is simpler to understand than the "unshared directories of files" model (I won't really be confident unless and until I actually use the thing a lot, of course). [...]
If ROX apps included a checksum, and the system verified it before running the app, that would give you the same thing trust-wise, I think.
That's an interesting idea, but how would the system find the app?
The system doesn't have to find the app -- the user finds the app, using the same techniques he uses to find anything else in the filesystem he's interested in.
In somebody else's user account, right? And the dependencies? And what app is that, anyway? http://0install.net/survey.html """If you don't know the hash, you can't trust it! Making it easy to browse the cache "Hey look - there's the Gimp! Let's run it!" is therefore an anti-goal.""" Of course, you could specify both the app (== URL, or hash, or pet name for it, or something like that) *and* where its data is on the disk, but that's a more complicated and less useful interface. John