Greg Ewing wrote:
That looks interesting, but I'm not sure I'd quite call it "something like". It looks like another case of adding more complexity to fight existing complexity, rather than removing the original complexity.
You won't be able to remove the initial complexity, because it is a feature. Honestly, one of the thing which annoys me the most when I have to use mac os X or windows is the lack of package management. Now, I don't think the situation on linux is ideal either. There are some technical issues, and some social issues; the worst thing to do is to find a technical solution to a social problem, so it is important to separate the two kinds, I think. On windows, most windows developers, as I understand it, do not have a strong need for package manager because they have almost everything they want with visual studio and MS dev tools. On a new linux machine, I may do apt-get install devtools. On windows, I run setup.exe for VS, plus the full Windows SDK. In a way, they do the same thing: providing everything a developer may need with as little hassle as possible for the developer (compilers, api, sdk, docs, etc... in a way which such as all the disparate things work together).
In other words, it seems to be just another package manager, albeit a particulary nice-sounding one.
There are two ways of looking at it, I think. One is to think that linux FHS (and unix in general) is totally broken. I personally really like how gobo linux tries to go around that: http://www.gobolinux.org/ It is like stow on steroids: I try to avoid installing anything from sources which is not handled through stow, and gobolinux just go one step further (quite a big step). The other one is to say disk space is cheap, just bundle everything (ala mac os X). 0install is a partial solution. There are also projects like klik or glick (done by a Red Had employer), which may be more similar to what you are after: Note that mac os X is a combination of the two in some ways. cheers, David