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 _______________________________________________ gobolinux-devel mailing list gobolinux-devel@lists.gobolinux.org http://lists.gobolinux.org/mailman/listinfo/gobolinux-devel
