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

Posted Jan 9, 2011 15:56 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: Free Software: the road to a Universal bundle, a powerful app store, and world domination (Free Software Magazine) by talex
Parent article: Free Software: the road to a Universal bundle, a powerful app store, and world domination (Free Software Magazine)

I looked it over when it was first discussed here, and saw enough downsides to never even try it. If I need a package that isn't in my distributions repos, I either do an extraofficial install (under $HOME or /usr/local) by hand, and am acutely aware of the mess I could get into; or I go and create a package and install that, thus getting the advantages of package management for real.

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

Posted Jan 9, 2011 16:38 UTC (Sun) by talex (guest, #19139) [Link]

Yes, installing things by hand does seem to cause a mess. Especially if you install a library into /usr/local that then silently overrides the distribution's one. Might work at first (as it's newer) but then cause trouble down the line.

Could you give some examples of the downsides of 0install you saw, though? I'm still not quite clear what they are.