Free Software: the road to a Universal bundle, a powerful app store, and world domination (Free Software Magazine)

Posted Jan 5, 2011 18:37 UTC (Wed) by talex (guest, #19139)
In reply to: Free Software: the road to a Universal bundle, a powerful app store, and world domination (Free Software Magazine) by nevyn
Parent article: Free Software: the road to a Universal bundle, a powerful app store, and world domination (Free Software Magazine)

I don't think the distributions hate it. In fact, most Linux distributions have a zeroinstall-injector package in their repositories (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch and Gentoo at least). OpenSUSE is the notable exception, and they seem to be considering it: https://features.opensuse.org/310040

Having a way for users to install packages in a way that won't mess up the distribution package system (e.g. by introducing conflicts with distribution packages), yet still allows depending on distribution packages where possible should be pretty useful to distributions, and having packages and libraries work across distributions should be useful to smaller distributions at least.

Free Software: the road to a Universal bundle, a powerful app store, and world domination (Free Software Magazine)

Posted Jan 5, 2011 20:08 UTC (Wed) by nevyn (guest, #33129) [Link]

> I don't think the distributions hate it. In fact, most Linux
> distributions have a zeroinstall-injector package in their repositories.

There's a huge difference between getting something into the repos. and the people in charge of the distro. "liking it". Esp. the community distros. like Fedora/Debian/etc. there tends to need to be a really big reason not to have something accepted.

I doubt you'll find anyone working on apt in Debian, or yum in Fedora (etc. etc.) who would recommend zero-install. Or that any number other than one is the best number of package managers to be using.