[Distutils] how to easily consume just the parts of eggs that are good for you

[John J Lee]

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