[ILUG] Linux Package Management

[David Golden]

On Sunday 30 September 2001 11:31, Liam Bedford wrote:
> > I'd like to see something like *Step or the old Amiga way of installation
> The way that OS X does it then?
>
OS X being the newest incarnation of  NextStep, of course. :-)

> I haven't checked, but IIRC they called them bundles.
>

Yup.   ROX (clone of the Acorn RiscOS UI on X), also has a similar concept.
It seems to be a feature of desktop environments that people regard
as the height of user-friendliness.  Note that it's about making it easier
for lusers, not competent sysadmins - the advantage of the "bundle" approach
is that it doesn't actually make life harder for the sysadmins, while making 
it easier for the luser (unlike, say, windows installation systems, which 
combine the opacity of application-specific installation scripts with the
quagmire of the single-tree installed applications style) 

> how does this deal with shared libraries? 

It doesn't.  for that you still need coherent library versioning at the very 
least (which everything but windows seems to have (although, to be fair, 
these days on 'doze it's all about the COM versioning, not lib versioning)). 
and for dependency tracking you presumably still need some sort of database - 
but that database could be expressed in the filesystem itself  a bit more 
nicely  -  say, with a subdir of the app bundle actually containing symlinks 
to dependencies it expects - if the dependencies aren't present,
well, then the symlink will be broken, and highlighted prominently by pretty
much any directory tool in existence..