[gobolinux-devel] Software Installation

[Isaac Dupree]

Matt Lawrence wrote:
> The last email was a bit long. I'll try my best to make this short ;)
> 
> You have an excellent package database system. This the core of any
> installation method. However, what is needed is a flexible binary
> package format.

what needs to be flexible about it?  For example, Nix binaries are 
stored in "Nix Archive" format which is a deterministic representation 
of the (relevant properties of a) filesystem tree -- because that's 
useful for their purposes.  Curiously, it turns out that they can 
generally be relocated in a limited way by hash rewriting, e.g. between
/nix/store/r8vvq9kq18pz08v249h8my6r9vs7s0n3-firefox-2.0.0.1/
and
/nix/store/5lbfaxb722zpef8dhd9np843hc23ja2n-firefox-2.0.0.1/
.
( http://nixos.org/about.html )

But binaries aren't very flexible, because they tend to depend on the 
exact dependencies they were built against, unless you get lucky.

"download the binaries from third-party website" sounds like a bad idea 
to me.  When I'm on Linux-PPC for example, it's highly unlikely that any 
third-party website (even if I trusted its binaries) would have any. 
Only distros like Debian's build farms are the things I've seen that 
actually make such obscure binaries.  But it's highly likely that the 
source code would work much better for me in general.  At least the 
distro would like the source code so they can build it against the exact 
dependencies in the particular version of the distro that I'm using.

Nevertheless some people still want to download third-party binaries. 
I've even done it myself when the source-code distribution wasn't quite 
working for me (UnAngband).  Worse, it's sometimes proprietary.  Maybe I 
should do a study of what happens when I email university groups who 
foolishly don't make their freeware research programs open-source.  I 
don't care, and in any case third-part binaries work passably as the 
"source code" of a recipe.  (nasty, emulators, different-version 
dependency views... nasty.)

Yes it would be nice if there was a free lunch.  I'd rather find a way 
to do things soundly, even if it means that well-behaved citizens are 
more first-class than broken or restricted ones.  There is enough 
computing power in this world.  There are enough not-very-broken, 
free-software around, to make this work, with enough social momentum 
behind them.

does zero-install attempt to take distros out of the picture?  That 
might be interesting.  But I always think it's foolish when third 
parties build .debs (although partly it's okay because of how one 
buildfarm can't work for everyone, I guess, as long as it's a 
centralized buildfarm).

hmm, no idea whether any of that was relevant to you

-Isaac