[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Hi,
On MacOSX, Yes you can add any directory to the path for any user just like any other unix box (play with their bash startup scripts or system bash startup scripts).

It is ironic you say that, immediately after complaining that linux requires you to mess around with LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

And it is IMHO unreasonable to expect people to maintain lengthy PATHs in their bashrc in order to access the CLI functionality of an Application bundle that has CLI functionality.
Especially because it requires investigating what to add. People have asked here a number of times how to do it, because they tried accessing the CLI tools via what they thought was the right path, but which apparently wasn't.


Anyway. This was just an example of one way in which I think Application bundles may have their weak points.

As for code verification on load, that is much more desirable than just signing the original package as it helps prevent any improperly changed code from launching.

I am not afraid of my code being changed. It is owned by root.
The kernel is also owned by root. Maybe they will change that instead.

Okay, it's good-to-have. But I am pretty sure the current lack of it is NOT what prevents the mystical Year of the Linux Desktop.

Single file drag and drop installation and distributed metadata, makes installation and package management much easier without the central failure point of a registry. This all in turn allows much more robust sandboxing.

Linux is simply behind the times in that and as Linus pointed out, the distribution specific changes are killing commercial dev for Linux.

I am hoping the new work on the Linux App Containers will fix most of these issues.

Not sure what you are arguing against here. Linus even agrees with me!

Linus certainly seems to agree on the need for /opt applications which don't require recompiling every time the OS gets a trivial update.
But I do not seem to see where he agrees with any of your other points.

Both Windows and linux don't have a drag-and-drop installation.
Both store metadata in central locations. Windows has its registry, linux uses desktop files and custom-mimetype.xml stored in central directories, owned by packages, which are cached by the MIME database and can be trivially rebuilt from scratch.
(Very pissed, by the way, that defaults are essentially random and also sometimes change at random. Windows 8 fixed that, but did linux? noooo...)
As far as I know, Linus is fine with both of those.
As far as I know, the linux package manager model is usually held up as an example of why Windows is/was massively behind the times (no centralized source for installation and updates? ) -- excepting the fragmentation of distros duplicating the same efforts, which is of course a huge problem for commercial adoption, making it equivalent to Windows.
OSX of course has had an App Store for a while. Just like linux packaging except all Applications use isolated installs (linux could, technically, do the same if that is how the distros chose to compile an application. But they won't...)


So all three of us agree on the need for some equivalent to Windows applications that bundle their own dependencies so long as you have a working kernel (and Linus doesn't break userspace).
As far as that goes.



Which is all I am saying, really. You seem to be discussing a couple different points lumped together.
And they seem to be OSX > Windows & linux
Not Windows & OSX > linux