GoboLinux [LWN.net]

GoboLinux

Posted Jan 10, 2008 20:03 UTC (Thu) by pphaneuf (subscriber, #23480)
In reply to: GoboLinux by dany
Parent article: GoboLinux

That's what it reminded me too, but Mac OS X also has the regular directories (they are hidden in the Finder, but you can see them in a shell).

Applications on Mac OS X also also easier to install without needing a package manager (just drag and drop in the /Applications directory), in most of the cases anyway (drivers and things that are plugins to other software use installers, for example). So the fact that they don't have a good package manager isn't nearly as bad as some people make it to be, since the pain level is reduced (drivers and plugins are a pain, though, but they're not the common case).

Mac OS X also has a different way of starting applications (which the Finder uses), where a directory with a special extension is considered an application (it might have to have certain files inside of it, as well). Many Linux users still start applications through the command line rather than from the menus or file browser, even for GUI applications.

Because of this, the Mac OS X way is much weaker for command line programs (that's more or less why /usr/bin and friends still exist). But that's okay, since their target market does not really care about that.

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GoboLinux

Posted Jan 15, 2008 17:39 UTC (Tue) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]

So the fact that they don't have a good package manager isn't nearly as bad as some people make it to be [snip]

Yes it is. If you accidently delete an application in OS X, you have to reinstall the entire operating system to get it back. Or alternatively, download a shareware utility to extract and reinstall the individual application.

There's really no excuse for this. Apple needs to take some of the developers it has working on trivial things like eye candy and get them working on a half-way decent package manager. What they have now is worse than Slackware.

GoboLinux

Posted Jan 15, 2008 18:46 UTC (Tue) by pphaneuf (subscriber, #23480) [Link]

If you accidentally delete a normal application in OS X, you have to reinstall just that application. The definition of "normal" here is whether it came in a package or just as the application in a disk image. If it's a package, it's not normal.

Of course, it makes it kind of annoying that most of the applications that come with OS X itself (the iWork trial, Safari, iSync, etc) come from packages. In the case of those "abnormal" applications, true, you have to reinstall the package, which in their case, is the operating system itself (gah!).

The curious thing of note here is that the package manager hurts instead of helping. The applications that don't use the package manager are simple to deal with and don't pose the problem you mention! To follow through on that thinking path, one could simply get rid of the package manager entirely, rather than getting a "better" one.

What I would like is if the applications that came bundled with OS X were simply in a "Bundled Applications" directory on the installation media, where the installer could simply copy them the plain old way, and if you deleted one of them, you'd simply plop back the DVD and drag-and-drop it back into place, done and done.

Where OS X applications really drop the ball compared to sophisticated Linux package managers (by which I mean apt), is with updates. That is also the reason why the bundled applications are from a package (which you can reinstall separately, without reinstalling the entire operating system, I should point out) rather than the way I described.

What I'd really like is for people to think outside the box a little bit. For example, OS X applications being self-contained is a pretty interesting property, making installation and removal trivial (deleting an application is done by, well, deleting the application, that's quite straightforward!). Note that applications can register themselves for certain things, like being able to open certain types of files.

Now, picture that they can register where they came from (their "repository", in a certain way). The Software Update application could then handle updates for all applications that registered a repository, transparently, without introducing a "real package manager" (or, at the very least, the explicit steps of installing or removing a "package"). You'd still have a direct manipulation of the application for installing/removing, and you'd have automated updating.

I don't know about you, but I've never heard or seen such a thing, I think that'd be what some people would call innovation, possibly! Wouldn't it be nice that we came up with it first, instead of Apple?