Petreley On Simplifying Software Installation for Linux

markcappel writes "RAM, bandwidth, and disk space are cheap while system administrator time is expensive. That's the basis for Nicholas Petreley's 3,250-word outline for making Linux software installation painless and cross-distro." The summary paragraph gives some hint as to why this isn't likely to happen anytime soon.

Comments

Autopackage comes to mind

[Simon (S2)]

Autopackage comes to mind.

from the site:
* Build packages that will install on many different distros
* Packages can be interactive
* Multiple front ends: best is automatically chosen so GUI users get a graphical front end, and command line users get a text based interface
* Multiple language support (both in tools and for your own packages)
* Automatically verifies and resolves dependancies no matter how the software was installed. This means you don't have to use autopackage for all your software, or even any of it, for packages to succesfully install.

Gentoo

[Tyler Eaves]

emerge

Doesn't get any simpler than that. Come back in a minute to 12 hours (Depending on the package), and *poof* new software. Ditto BSD ports.

Matrix Reloaded spoiler in parent

[jeroenvw]

WARNING: Stupid Matrix reloaded spoiler in parent, in the middle of the 4th paragraph

OpenStep / OS X frameworks

[pldms]

Did some of the suggestions remind anyone of the OpenStep frameworks idea?

Frameworks (very roughly) are self contained libraries containing different versions, headers, and documentation. Java jar libraries are somewhat similar.

The problem is that using frameworks requires major changes to the tool chain - autoconf et al, cc, ld etc.

Apple shipped zlib as a framework in OS X 10.0 (IIRC) but getting unix apps to use it was very difficult. Apple now only seem to use frameworks for things above the unix layer.

I suspect there are lessons to be learned from this. As another poster said, evolution rather than revolution is more likely to succeed.