Installing to your home drive [LWN.net]

Installing to your home drive

Posted Feb 23, 2011 19:08 UTC (Wed) by talex (subscriber, #19139)
In reply to: Installing to your home drive by idupree
Parent article: Optimizing Linux with cheap flash drives

ZeroInstall I believe does source and binary (not sure how it manages binary) without root privileges.

In my experience (0install developer), a surprising number of programs are relocatable:

Anything that's been ported to Windows or Mac will be relocatable.
Anything that encourages non-technical end-users to download beta versions will be relocatable.
Things written in languages with built-in string concatenation (i.e. anything except C) are usually relocatable.
Libraries always seem to be relocatable (not sure why this is; maybe to allow them to be bundled with other relocatable programs?).

There were a few suggestions for supporting non-relocatable programs (e.g. using Plash to adjust paths at runtime, Klik-style binary rewriting, etc) but there don't seem to be many programs that need it these days.

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Installing to your home drive

Posted Feb 23, 2011 22:36 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Libraries always seem to be relocatable (not sure why this is; maybe to allow them to be bundled with other relocatable programs?).

That is definitely not always true. The KDE3 libraries, for instance, were not relocatable: they had $datadir and $libdir/kde3 baked into them. (I think the same is true of glib and gtk as well.)