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

[Lucian Branescu]

As a linux user much of my life and an OS X user for the past year, I
dearly miss package management. Self-contained bundles are ok as far
as they have minimal dependencies besides the existing platform
libraries. When you simply bundle everything, you get 100MB+ bundles
for pretty much everything and enormous memory usage because of no
shared libs.

2009/8/18 Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com>:
> Hi Bert,
>
> On 18 Aug 2009, at 09:10, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Hmmm.... Sorry Bert, but pretty sure everything you mention above
> (QuickLook, SpotLight indexing, file document types/icons, web
> plugins) for can go in the users ~/Library with absolutely no need to
> request admin permissions for the whole system (affecting all users).
>
> I agree you might want to use an installer rather than drag and drop,
> though first run of an App could put these extras in place as needed.
> As for hard-coding a path to /Applications, you can ask the system to
> tell you the path to the application bundle, but if I remember, there
> are a few cases where even Apple slips up on this one (and I'm sure
> causes no end of bug reports and support calls for Apple when folks
> system upgrade after moving such an Application) – so I won't diss you
> too much for that hack ;-)
>
> Also as an alternitive, if you have control of the file format bundle,
> QuickLook previews and SpotLight indexes can also live there, though I
> understand that you'll likely want to keep with an existing cross-
> platform file format that can't take advantage.
>
> So I'd say Etoys could just be a single drag'n'drop Mac application
> into Applications folder (that does it's extras on first run, MS Mac
> apps do this quite a bit), or at the very least a regular package
> installer with no need for the admin password.
>
> Apologies for the off list topic reply.
>
> Regards,
> --Gary
>
> P.S. So, can I have a job now making Etoys truly Mac friendly ;-)
>
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