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Interesting.
With how cheap disk space is these days, I can see the logic in what they're doing.
Speculating for a moment: I wouldn't be suprised if some of the additional disk space could be recovered via ZFS deduping.
It is a trade-off. Disk space is not so much of an issue. But if some commonly-used library contains a security vulnerability, lots of PBIs need upgrading. I am not sure if the average desktop user cares. And it's certainly not a step back from OS X application bundles, or Windows' "lets include all DLLs with the application to be sure"*.
* Not meant as a critique, I do this as well.
Edited 2010-10-28 15:21 UTC
Chakra (an Arch linux spin-off) is trying the same thing with "bundles". The few of their bundles I've seen are smaller than PBIs (Firefox for example is half smaller -but still twice as big as the windows exe).
http://chakra-project.org/bundles.html
It would be good to have a technical comparison, but I'm too inexperienced for that.
Edited 2010-10-28 16:17 UTC




Member since:
2008-08-27
The PBI system is interesting - if I recall this correctly, each PBI is meant to be a complete self-contained install of a program, containing all the dependencies. It wastes some space, but makes the system very simple to work with.