On Fri, 15 Aug 2003, Gordon McMillan wrote: [...] > It may be a surprise to the developer community, but there are > a lot of Unix users who are not developers and do not have > root priveleges on their machines. These people want to install > to ~/bin and don't particularly care what the install looks like. > > In this country it's usually analysts, statisticians and scientists. > In other countries where MS is not so popular, it's anybody. [...] Missed this discussion... A concrete example: the Pybliographer project (bibliographic database manager). Pyblio has had real problems with buggy shared libraries and Python & library versioning, and would certainly benefit from this kind of thing. The obvious problem with rpm / deb packages is that, in reality, a Redhat rpm isn't always portable to a SuSe system, etc. (there are a whole lot of GNU/Linux distributions out there, especially when you consider the rapid release schedule of many distributions!). Single-file executables eliminate that problem (though of course having a single executable doesn't preclude packaging in an rpm / deb -- makes it trivial to make portable packages, in fact). 'Proper' binary packages certainly have their place, but so do one-file executables, IMHO. Gordon's point about people outside North America, Western / Central Europe and Oz / NZ is very important -- that group of users certainly isn't going to shrink! John
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