[Sugar-devel] Bundling libraries, RPMs? (was Re: WatchMe-1, a VNC activity)

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 17.08.2009, at 23:34, Gary C Martin wrote:

> For the Mac users, it's just "Drag this application to your
> application folder." Done, end of story. For the worst application
> offenders (and there are some, usually some of the big corps who can
> get away with it) the user is asked for their admin password, but this
> always looks like shoddy, dodgy application development from
> developers who don't really know what they are doing on a Mac.


Gary, this is highly unfair to Mac developers.

Self-contained bundles can be installed just by drag-and-drop indeed.  
But you need an installer (which might ask for an admin password) to  
integrate with the system, e.g. to install QuickLook plugins which  
generates previews for your documents, or SpotLight for indexing. And  
obviously the "big corps" do define their own document types, and want  
them to integrate with the system. Users expect them to.

E.g., Etoys needs an installer on the Mac to put its web browser  
plugin in the right library folder. It does nothing "evil", the main  
app could as well be installed by drag-and-drop, but we can't expect  
everyone to manually install the plugin. Also, the plugin needs to  
know where to find the app so we must require the app to be installed  
into /Applications. And once we have a QuickLook plugin we will need  
to install that too. Now you may call Etoys development "shoddy and  
dodgy" all you like, but please blame it for its actual faults.

- Bert -