[maemo-developers] Repositories mess: conclusions and actions

[From: Niklas Höglund]

I fully agree that Zero Install is a good fit for this device.

I use a lot of different machines, and setting up software on all of
them is a lot of administration work. The idea with Zero Install is that
you just have applications "bookmarked" and then downloaded and cached
on demand. This way you just have to copy your bookmarks to a new
machine. The applications take a bit longer to start the first time, of
course, since it needs to download them.

I did a quick and dirty port of 0launch back in 2006. It was a bit slow,
mostly to start Python and PyGTK. And I didn't put in the effort to
automatically turn the network on, and change some dialogs that should
really be full-screen on this device.

The web page I put up is still available at
http://web.telia.com/~u86012345/nokia770/

As to the security aspect, I don't think it is any less secure to have a
program download a GnuPG-signed application automatically than if I
click on a deb file on a web page.

A nice thing about this system is that you can run two different
applications that link to different versions of the same library without
stepping on interfering. This will only be done if the libraries are
accessed from different sites or if the applications restrict the
acceptable versions. Normally you'd want to use the newest version
available, but this system sandboxes different applications so that they
cannot mess with each other.

-- 
Niklas