AppStream Ideas and Thoughts

[James Rhodes]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 7:05 AM, James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>  This is why 15+ years later "nobody" is using stow, autopackage,
> zero-install, etc. and Apple have recently got huge amounts of press for
> going from "run .dmg files from a random developers website" (the
> perfect developers dream) to "get approved apps. into our central
> packaging repo." (far more centralized than even apt).
>  Which is also why I generally don't respond, why spend an hour or more
> writing an email when I can just wait 5-10 years?

I think my point here is that AppTools, unlike autopackage and similar
tools, doesn't actually remove the ability to run repositories, in
fact it's still encouraged for various reasons which I outlined above.
 The main point of AppTools is to *integrate* the centralized
repositories with a mechanism that allows people to easily install
software from third-parties if they want to.  They don't have to, they
can still use only the software in the central repository.  But if
they come across some interesting software on the internet and they
want to try it out, they don't have to install a compiler and all the
-src and -devel packages just to try something out for 5 minutes and
they shouldn't have to frig around with manually installing
dependencies either (which is something that tools like Klik and
AppImage suffer from, as far as I am aware).

Since it bears repeating, AppTools *does not* take away your
centralized repositories.  The entire point of AppTools is to offer an
integration between centralized repositories and third-party packages.
 Otherwise, I'd just go use Klik.

Regards, James.