Re: AppDirs, evolved?

Neil Graham <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.desktop.rox.user
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Sat, 19 Jun 2010 17:42:08 -0700, Mithat Konar wrote:

> Is anyone familiar with the "SpatialBundle" concept being developed by
> Luca Cappelletti? Here is an Italian Wikipedia page on it (which Google
> translates reasonably well): http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpatialBundle
> 
> Of interest are the presence of AppRun, AppInfo.xml, and .DirIcon files.
> Do these come from an ancestor common to ROX, or is this a direct
> descendant of ROX?

Looks like a descendant,  This is something that I had been giving some 
thought to myself.  Especially after seeing the discussion about fatelf 
and adding icons to elf files. The desire seems to be for bundles. and 
the ROX bundle system seems like a good starting point.

The things I had imagined to be logical points of extension were:
	Allow a single bundle support multiple architectures
	Include libraries within the bundle.  
	Cooperation with ZeroInstall
	The ability to optionally Trim a bundle to only include content 
required on the current platform.

SpatialBundles certainly has the multiple platforms and library inclusion 
but I note that the freedesktop pages were last edited in 2008.

I think it would be interesting if bundles could include what would 
effectively be zero install cache directories.  That way they could use 
their own copy if ZeroInstall was not present and use the ZeroInstall 
cache version if ZeroInstall exists.  If the cache entry does not exist 
then it can populate it itself with it's own copy (after checking sha1 of 
course).  That way bundles would share libraries saving on ram usage.

Bundles holding more than you need for the current platform by definition 
would use more disk space, but having the option to trim would solve that 
problem, but overall on-disk storage seems to be a non-issue for 
software.  When even the smallest devices take SD cards.  Software alone 
is practically incapable of using up your storage. That's a task for 
Images and video.  

I shall read what Google translates the Italian into and think on it some 
more.



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