Tomorrow, Ubuntu's second 'long-term support' release, 8.04 or Hardy Heron, will propagate its way through the list of mirrors. OSNews took a short look at the beta release of Hardy Heron a few weeks ago, and concluded that "All in all, this release packs some interesting new features and frameworks, some of which should have been part of any Linux distribution three years ago. It is quite clearly a beta though, and definitely not ready yet to be labeled as a 'long term support' release." In anticipation of the release, El Reg caught up with Mark Shuttleworth in London.
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Member since:2007-07-25
Dumping everything into one folder is not the answer. When Apple has more people developing for the Mac, and there is more of a reliance on core, shared components, then they'll see why that is. "
Well I see this perhaps from a different angle: if I want a packet that is NOT in the repository, how should this be installed? I don't want to have to add a new repository for each package I want to install (like seems to be the solution for ubuntu), and I don't want to be limited by what the repository maintainers says I should have access to. By downloading external packages these may or may not know what shared libraries (and versions) that are present on the target system (and here is the problem with different distros). Furthermore, spreading the files "all over the system" like many unixes does today is not very plesant when I want to remove or otherwise modify the stuff.
All I want is a system where I can download a single file from the vendors website and just click it and it works.
Member since:2006-09-10
For .deb based systems there's gdebi. If I click on a *package* built for my version of Ubuntu in my browser then it's downloaded and launched in gdebi automatically. This then checks that the required dependencies are installed and installs them from the repositories if necessary, it then installs the downloaded package. All with two clicks.
Member since:2005-10-15
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-17
the Apple .apps in Applications are just flimsy zipped file structures with some metadata. That way all the special things a specific app might need can be put there to override system defaults. It just LOOKS like one click-n-drag file to the user... which is cool!
Ubuntu handles repositories pretty well from the handful of things I've had to add manually. I'm surprised they don't support something like Klix that the Knoppix guys were working on. That was similar to how .apps work by putting a "flipped" Unix tree of symlinks in one folder and calling it one file. There's no way on any system to get around having some dependency issues and duplication of library functions at some level. Even my iSeries has Library structure and higherarchy to handle same name files with different versions.
Member since:2006-01-03
Member since:2005-11-15
I think the trick is that the operating system and the main frameworks are provided by Apple and then the developers just write applications that use them. Whereas under Linux the people who wanted to write a decent graphics application ended up writing their own complete graphics framework.
Its quite likely that the Linux package managers are far more advanced with all their dependency tracking than the Mac is where you just drag a folder out of a virtual disk into applications.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Dumping everything into one folder is not the answer. When Apple has more people developing for the Mac, and there is more of a reliance on core, shared components, then they'll see why that is.