[Leaplist] FSM Essay on Linux Software Installation

[Jim Hartley]

The real problem, what LIBs and DLLs were invented for, is the amount of 
disk space you end up using without them. You probably have 47 programs 
on your system that do something with JPEGs, but they all use the same 
routines in, say, LIBJPEG or JPEG.DLL. That's a Hell of a lot of copies 
of that JPEG code. Well, maybe not so much now with 500GB disks, but a 
lot of this stuff was done when you were lucky to have a 10MB HDD 
instead of just floppies.

If you want easily portable software, link it with the "static" option, 
and you'll get one single honking big file ... copy it to a thumb drive, 
or to your friend's computer (perfectly legal on Linux), update it by 
replacing it with a newer honking big file. Multiple versions? Sure, 
just give a different name to each of those honking big files, and call 
the one you want. OK, maybe you need to upgrade that 500GB HDD to a 2TB 
HDD, but what the heck!

I doubt we're going to change over to this way of doing things now ...

Jim Hartley

Steve Litt wrote:
> On Tuesday 23 June 2009 06:31:37 pm Bruce Metcalf wrote:
>> Gang,
>>
>> Copied below is an essay from this week's "FSM Newsletter" about
> [clip]
> 
>> I have a dream. A dream of a world where people distribute applications
>> as bundled directories, and these bundles work in Ubuntu, Fedora, etc --
>> and they _keep on working_ when a new version of the operating system is
>> installed. A world where software installation in GNU/Linux is _easy_
>> and applications can be swapped by simply copying them onto a memory stick.
>>
>> I wonder if I will ever see this in GNU/Linux?.
>>
>> _P.S._
>> _Some will say, "if you like the way OS X does things, use OS X". My
>> answer to that is, "I like the way OS X does things, it works, it solves
>> problems, but let's rather be inspired by it and improve it"_
> 
> Not in our lifetime.
> 
> First I'd like to say that app-in-tree is not an OS/x thing -- it's much older 
> and was very prominent in DOS, before "DLLs". You could copy WordPerfect from 
> one computer to another by copying the directory. I have a hunch the reason 
> commercial software got away from that was to prevent such copying.
> 
> Today I distribute UMENU as a tree. The original VimOutliner was distributed 
> as a tree, but when the project got big, the others wanted it to become a Vim 
> Plugin, so that's what happened.
> 
> See this UMENU documentation written in 1999:
> 
> http://www.troubleshooters.cxm/umenu/charter.htm#RespectfulofYourExistingSystem
> 
> I can see why runtime libraries need to be in a special place away from the 
> apps that use them, but a lot of apps are written in interpreters (Perl, 
> Python, Ruby), and there's absolutely no reason those can't be encapsulated 
> in their own directories, except that for some reason the vast majority of 
> people don't like apps to be contained in dedicated trees.
> 
> Whenever I write a new app, it goes in its own directory. Maybe it's because I 
> started in RT-11 and DOS, but that just seems natural to me.
> 
> SteveT
> 
> Steve Litt
> Recession Relief Package
> http://www.recession-relief.US
> Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt
> 
> 

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