On Sun, 13 Apr 2008, Greg Ewing wrote:
John J Lee wrote:
It allows you to think about "uninstallation" as "delete the app == delete the file"
But 0install doesn't do that, as far as I can tell -- it still keeps the data in some mysterious form and location known only to itself, and requires you to use special tools to install/remove apps.
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. But the presence of an app in the 0install cache -- which is what you mean here by "installed" -- doesn't change the behaviour of your system. One other reason, of course, is to free up disk space. You're correct that special tools are needed to manage the cache, and that that complicates the UI. I think that's a fair price to pay for safe sharing of data between users.
with ROX, it seems very similar to how I imagine Mac OS applications look
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. If you want to share data, it's a better way than unshared directories of files. That's how 0install and ROX are related, from this perspective.
But it also (plausibly) claims to allow sharing of the data that comprises an application and its dependencies between users who don't trust each other
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? If it doesn't, the data won't be shared. John