[Sugar-devel] Zero-calorie bundles?

[Bernie Innocenti]

El Thu, 15-10-2009 a las 19:18 +0200, Martin Langhoff escribió:
> Ok - that's good. I am familiar with the limitations we are hitting
> with rpm and dpkg. What I truly wonder about is things like
> 'autopackage' and klik.
> 
> See also the 'see also' section in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Install

It would be great if someone (Michael?) could approach them and invite
them to next Saturday's IRC meeting to confront ideas (i.e.: megaflame).


> A while ago there was some serious discussion of the issues with these
> 'non-OS' pkg managers. Here is "a" tip of the iceberg -
> http://www.licquia.org/archives/2006/03/11/autopackage-goes-insane/
> 
> The discussion was heated, and sprawled across blogs. Good points were
> made. Before taking on something like z-i... it'd be worth
> understanding the good, bad and ugly and how it applies to us...

I've read through this interesting saga, including the wiki page that
triggered it, which has moved here since then:

 http://trac.autopackage.org/wiki/LinuxProblems

My thinking is that Autopackage the folks are trying to solve an
unsolvable problem: 100% binary compatibility across different Linux
distributions (or different versions of the same distribution).

They will FAIL. And even if they'd succeed, they'd FAIL later on as the
x86 becomes less and less ubiquitous as x86-64, ARM and maybe MIPS gain
market share. It's a slow, but unstoppable process.

In a truly open market in which at least 3 or 4 architectures compete on
more or less equal ground, one could as well accomodate a few more build
variants for each architecture for the sake of the various OSes and
their evolutionary needs.


> > Getting the Zero Install folks involved may bring in fresh expertise
> 
> They'll know about z-i, not about the needs of Sugar or its users...
> hence the perspective I am mentioning.

Agreed, we should also hear from all the others. Well, perhaps not from
the Autopackage crowd, since we already know they FAIL.


:-)))

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/