Free desktop application distribution and installation

[Thomas Kluyver]

This may be a pipe dream, but XDG is the best place I know to propose
something like this:

We need a new mechanism for distributing end-user applications on free
desktop platforms.

Traditionally, distro packaging is considered the right way to distribute
applications. However, I believe that distro packaging is designed to
distribute libraries, frameworks and such tools for developers and
sysadmins, not end user applications. Specifically:

* Distro packages are almost always out of date. Even with 'quick' six
month release cycles, the gap between the developer making a release and
users getting it is measured in weeks or months, when we (application
developers) want it to be hours or days.
* More broadly, distros put a layer between developers and users. That has
some benefits, but with end user applications we generally want to engage
more directly with the user, to present the image we choose and get
feedback directly.
* You need to provide different instructions for each distro - like this
download page for 0AD: play0ad.com/download/linux/
* If you want to package your application yourself, you realistically need
to deal with at least .deb and .rpm package formats, and if you care enough
about smaller distributions, there are still more formats. LSB attempted to
declare RPM the standard, but that hasn't really worked.
* On most distros, packages can only be installed as root, so to get even
some trivial game working, you have to hand it the keys to the kingdom.

As a result, on many application webpages, the download button gives you a
.tar.gz file - e.g. Firefox, Eclipse, Pycharm and Zotero. That avoids all
of the issues listed above, but it can't add things to $PATH, install
.desktop files, set up automatic updates, and so on, unless the
application's own code completes its installation when it's first run. And
if users are as lazy as me, they end up with applications 'installed' in
their Downloads folder, which doesn't seem quite right.

Still other applications try to rely on language specific packaging tools.
My background is in Python, and I've seen applications recommend you
install them with pip. Python packaging tools are pretty bad even for the
things they're supposed to do, and distributing applications is not one of
those things.

So, I would like a mechanism whereby:

1. Developers can publish applications without going through distro
maintainers. This could either be self-hosted installer files, or a
centralised location where you're free to claim a name (like PyPI, CPAN,
etc.)
2. When the user installs an application, it can set up command line tools
on $PATH and .desktop files to launch the application from the GUI.
3. Applications can be installed into ~/.local without giving them root
privileges
3.a For bonus points: capabilities based security, because root is not the
only thing we care about: http://xkcd.com/1200/
4. The installer should be able to specify dependencies on system packages
for any relevant packaging systems, because the developer shouldn't be
forced to bundle dependencies any more than they should be forced to
unbundle them.
5. A user with an application installed should be notified of updates,
without every application having to implement its own update checker and
downloader.
6. Ideally, all of this should be an addition to a tarball, so sites can
offer a single .app.tar.gz file, and users without the installer mechanism
can extract the files and launch the application manually.
7. This should, of course, be distro and desktop independent. We definitely
can't afford to fragment it by GNOME vs. KDE, or Debian vs. Red Hat.
Applications should have *one* button to download for Linux.

I am working on an end-user application, and I will try to build something
like this and test it by distributing that (glossing over 3a and probably
skipping 5 for the first iteration). Feedback, offers of help, and telling
me about similar things that already exist are all welcome.

Thanks,
Thomas
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