Ubuntu To Get Its Own Package Format, App Installer

[zoomblab]

You can release under the GPL, then only offer the source code i.e. no binaries.
Won't stop some determined people, but it will stop a lot. They do the same with Ardour.

That won't work. The distributions will step in and package binaries of your software in their repositories ready to be consumed with just a click. A possible measure against this is maybe to have separate projects for source and binary and trademark your product like Firefox or Chrome. But that also is not very effective, needs loads of money for the trademark + promotion of it, plus people will work around it anyway (e.g. Chrome -> Chromium or Firefox -> Iceweasel).

[Nille]

Those runtimes are actually dynamic - .net, msvc, xna and directx are examples of the few widely used dynamic libs on windows. Why Steam for windows installs them with every game is beyond me (maybe for some kind of additional sandboxing?).

Because Steam doesn't care if it already installed. Most Setups check if the Runtimes are installed and new enough for there needs and skip an new installation.

[kaprikawn]

Those runtimes are actually dynamic - .net, msvc, xna and directx are examples of the few widely used dynamic libs on windows. Why Steam for windows installs them with every game is beyond me (maybe for some kind of additional sandboxing?).

See:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=23759166&postcount=47

[Cyber Killer]

See:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forum...6&postcount=47

<facepalm> just leave it to ms to screw even the easiest things up ;-)

[ShadowBane]

Do you mean a well written python app like every thing with a semblance of calculation heaviness is done in another language or you do everything in python. Now I'm a pretty shitty python programmer but how do you as example calculate a mandelbrot in python with decent performance. My experince is python is dogslow,some other high level language like most decent jvm and net language is pretty good, sbl, c++ etc is good but not python.
Besides that I'm not completely convinced it's that big difference between programming python and modern c++ anymore. The big pain in the as with c++ is the compilation time

Run it with pypy or cython. If you are feeling really ambitious add in ctypes and get very good speed at the expense of having statically typed variables. (only using an interpreter that supports them though)

[Nille]

See:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forum...6&postcount=47

Thats not the truth. The DX Packages has the most older packages included.

[kaprikawn]

Thats not the truth. The DX Packages has the most older packages included.

It looks to me like a very intelligently written post, by someone who works in Valve. I'm no expert, but I believe it to be the truth. And the fact that every time I install a game on Steam with one of these dependencies invokes an install lends weight to the argument.

[Nille]

It looks to me like a very intelligently written post, by someone who works in Valve. I'm no expert, but I believe it to be the truth. And the fact that every time I install a game on Steam with one of these dependencies invokes an install lends weight to the argument.

Look in the DX Packages and you see that Valve lie.

[LightBit]

Static libraries suck.

This are not static libraries (*.a), just shared libraries (*.so) are bundled in package.
And static linking make sense, if library is small. I think /bin and /sbin should be statically linked.

[energyman]

The description says no inter-app dependencies with everything the app needs contained to the folder, that would imply every app will be statically linked to all the libraries it needs, and will ship with them in their folder.

beep. Wrong. That only means that they put all the libs needed into it. Nothing about the linking.

Welcome to dll hell. It sucks on windows, so Canonical has to copy it.