Free desktop application distribution and installation

[Alexander Larsson]

On tis, 2014-12-16 at 09:21 -0800, Thomas Kluyver wrote:
> On 16 December 2014 at 02:40, Alexander Larsson <alexl at redhat.com>
> wrote:
>         I agree, and I'm currently working on one (as are others
>         obviously as
>         seen in this thread) within Gnome (although the base code is
>         desktop
>         independent)
> 
> 
> Thanks - I think the more people there are trying to address this, the
> more likely someone will hit on a working solution.
> 
> 
> Please do make as much of it as possible desktop independent, and if
> possible, avoid badging this as a way to install 'GNOME applications'.
> No-one's about to win the free desktop wars, and if we end up with
> separate application systems for GNOME, Unity, KDE, etc., none of them
> are going to get much traction with third party application creators.

Well, there are two parts. One is the actual "runtime" that makes the
whole thing tick. This part is desktop independent.

The second part is to have an actual base runtime with dependencies that
you can use to write an application. Anyone could create one, and the
system obviously handles that, but I'm also creating a gnome specific
one both so that gnome applications can use it and to have *something*
to test things on.