Ubuntu To Get Its Own Package Format, App Installer

[shmerl]

When are they going to write their own kernel?

[frign]

Try reading. Its obvious you have no idea what your talking about. Another failure of the public education system.

Thanks for the obvious presentation of your ignorance.

[brosis]

1000? not even in windows or osx I have this problem...


And in Android I like or need to move most of my apps to the SD card you know.

I have seen winsxs grow as large as 90 GiB on 160GiB harddrive. Nearly every application brings its own set of libraries, they are "dynamic" only on paper.
In Linux due to using only one, rarely several versions of libraries, that co-exist in parallel yet for real reasons, the same stack would weight 1-2 GiB.

[Serge]

I remember seeing a reference to a survey about a year or two ago that said that people being confused with package management, with not being able to go to a website and download the installer for some program they want, as being a leading cause for giving up on Linux and going back to Windows. I assume that enabling such functionality would be a goal of this new installer.

Now, I've always felt that a clean, centralized package management system is one of the greatest strong points of the distribution I use (Debian), and do not at all miss the days of having to go download installers from websites.

So yeah, Ubuntu has needed something like this for a long time, I think. I just hope this approach doesn't become so popular that it starts to compete with centralized package management on other distros.

Anyway, yeah, as others have already pointed out in this thread, the implied dependency, the unlisted dependency, will be the Ubuntu base system. I think this might even make it more difficult to port packages to other distros, not easier.

Anyway, developers of proprietary software stand to benefit more from this than developers of open source software. With open source software, the distribution packagers take care of packaging binaries of the program. With proprietary software, the developers themselves have to provide binaries that will run on the target systems. Unfortunately, again, I think only those distributions who are compatible with the base systems that the developers will be packaging for will stand to benefit.

[Vadi]

This is a great idea. .debs are not easy to deal with and there's no graphical tools to help guide you through making one when you just ported your software to Linux.

[Passereaux]

Hrmph!

Ubuntu development was suppose to benefit all. It is not.

[nightmarex]

I remember seeing a reference to a survey about a year or two ago that said that people being confused with package management, with not being able to go to a website and download the installer for some program they want, as being a leading cause for giving up on Linux and going back to Windows. I assume that enabling such functionality would be a goal of this new installer.

Now, I've always felt that a clean, centralized package management system is one of the greatest strong points of the distribution I use (Debian), and do not at all miss the days of having to go download installers from websites.

part 1.) That's what I was afraid of, making idiot "point, click, infect" mentality spill into Linux land... great why the hell do idiots want that?!?!

part 2.) You hit the nail on the head. That's what I love about Linux, and the many different repositories also protect you!

When I said exe's aren't safe I didn't mean the application part of it the self installing download and run .exe that basically made Windows XP the biggest tech repair goldmine in history.

Why?!?! FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU.

[duby229]

I agree with your description. My problem is, that I don't see how you'd get a large enough batch of people that'd collect money and pay for it. You'd need to have a very interesting/original piece of software. Something 'average' (for example if something has been done already a few times and is available) won't do. Which is bad for me, since I lack the creativity to come up with something that hasn't be done already.

Also I still don't like the idea that someone is able to make money with a complete program I wrote. (if someone is using some source code from me, that's fine by me.) In my eyes the GPL is all about rights of the 'customer' aka the user, the developer has nearly no rights and that's what I'm not comfortable about.

Actually, I disagree, the GPL is about protecting the code. The author of the code can do what he wants with it, but non-authors must abide the GPL. Therefore the code is protected.

[GreatEmerald]

I remember seeing a reference to a survey about a year or two ago that said that people being confused with package management, with not being able to go to a website and download the installer for some program they want, as being a leading cause for giving up on Linux and going back to Windows. I assume that enabling such functionality would be a goal of this new installer.

Now, I've always felt that a clean, centralized package management system is one of the greatest strong points of the distribution I use (Debian), and do not at all miss the days of having to go download installers from websites.

With the current popularity of App Store, Android Market, whatever is on Windows 8 etc., I'm pretty sure that we no longer need installer downloading. Rather, everyone else seem to be shifting towards centralised distribution instead. So it would be a step back. And if it's required by something, even now we have the ability to create such installers - either as RPM/DEB packages, or self-made installers (like fglrx does). No reason to create a yet another package format for this particular problem.

[Serge]

I remember seeing a reference to a survey about a year or two ago that said that people being confused with package management, with not being able to go to a website and download the installer for some program they want, as being a leading cause for giving up on Linux and going back to Windows. I assume that enabling such functionality would be a goal of this new installer.

Now, I've always felt that a clean, centralized package management system is one of the greatest strong points of the distribution I use (Debian), and do not at all miss the days of having to go download installers from websites.

So yeah, Ubuntu has needed something like this for a long time, I think. I just hope this approach doesn't become so popular that it starts to compete with centralized package management on other distros.

Anyway, yeah, as others have already pointed out in this thread, the implied dependency, the unlisted dependency, will be the Ubuntu base system. I think this might even make it more difficult to port packages to other distros, not easier.

Anyway, developers of proprietary software stand to benefit more from this than developers of open source software. With open source software, the distribution packagers take care of packaging binaries of the program. With proprietary software, the developers themselves have to provide binaries that will run on the target systems. Unfortunately, again, I think only those distributions who are compatible with the base systems that the developers will be packaging for will stand to benefit.

After re-reading what I wrote in here, I've realized that I'm essentially spreading FUD. Let me just add a footnote to make a point absolutely clear: I am merely speculating on what this installer might be capable of, and what might happen. By no means am I trying to give people the impression that things absolutely will turn out the way I write in that post.