useless and useful distinctions [LWN.net]

useless and useful distinctions

Posted Jan 27, 2012 12:30 UTC (Fri) by bluss (guest, #47454)
In reply to: useless and useful distinctions by gravious
Parent article: The case for the /usr merge

/Applications should better be a place for "packaged" programs that keep all their files together in one place. It's a nice concept from OS X with benefits both high and low.. to begin with you can just copy files into place, instead of trusting a random installer to not spray files over the filesystem ("services" you didn't ask for etc).

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useless and useful distinctions

Posted Jan 27, 2012 16:56 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (2 responses)

That doesnt always work out that way in practice. Removing an app from /applications doesn't remove any settings or cache files in your home directory or any system wee services or config files. Applications absolutely do spread files around that don't get cleaned up when putting the .app in the trash

useless and useful distinctions

Posted Jan 30, 2012 1:39 UTC (Mon) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link] (1 responses)

That is a feature, since it results in uninstallation + reinstallation being a no-op.

useless and useful distinctions

Posted Jan 30, 2012 17:42 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

The downside is that it means there are old configuration files around when you upgrade. That's OK if you make sure that the new version can't be tripped up by older configuration files, but that's apparently harder than it looks. This isn't terrible when you're upgrading only one application, since you have only one configuration to look through for incompatibilities, but it can be a pain when you're upgrading your whole distribution while trying to keep an old /home. My recent experience is that tracking down configuration incompatibilities takes more time on a distro upgrade than installing all the packages. It's still easier than completely recreating a configuration from scratch would be, but it's a definite area for improvement.