[plug] Point and Click

[Cameron Patrick]

Timothy White wrote:

> Has anyone got comments on ROX and Zero Install?

Rox is nice bit has a few ... quirks which I suspect HarryCraig may be
more knowledge about.  It's a clone of the Acorn RISC OS file manager
which is another system that got mostly lost on the mists of time,
although I believe quite a few schools in WA had Acorn machines.

Never used Zero Install but from what I've read it sounds kind of
nifty but a potential administrative nightmare.  The "let's make a
sub-filesystem hierarchy of our own and shove everything in there"
notion doesn't appeal to me.  RISC OS-style appdirs are nice (and I
belive Apple have adopted them in Mac OS X) but seem like the Wrong
Way of handling libraries.

Requiring a kernel patch is really off-putting too.

> It could be a real winner for Windoz users but how good is it in the
> long run for multi-user computers (still desktop, not servers)?

The multi-user aspect is not an issue; the caching of applications is
done on a global basis (per-computer, could probably be per-LAN with
minimal effort).

Craig Ringer wrote:

> I'm unconvinced, myself. It still requires the user to have appropriate
> development headers installed for various packages; that's one of the
> things that often catches newbies out.

Okay, I'm confused here.  Are you saying that you need to have
development tools installed to compile and install Zero Install
itself?  I would've that that kind of goes without saying.  Zero
Install packages themselves are just binaries and mostly self
contained so I can't see why you'd need development headers installed
to 

> I also think it's rather impractical for larger apps. Zero-install
> OO.o?

Well, why not?  The initial download might be hefty 

> Personally, I'm in favour of encouraging compatibility between distros
> to the extent where it's possible to build packages that just work on
> all of them.

Have you looked into autopackage?  http://www.autopackage.org/
It tries to do some kind of cross-distro magic.  It seems kind of icky
to me (yet another packaging system with its own package database and
all that) but the installers it generates look pretty.

> There's also the issue of limited support for Zero-install, and the fact
> that it's yet another layer and another thing to learn.

Yeah.

Cameron.