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Comment by chrisdotcode | Hacker News Reader

> We need a consistent way for third-parties to distribute software

Isn't this what package managers are all about? - a thing which, by the way, I believe the notion of an "App Store" from the other two OSes took inspiration from.

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> Isn't this what package managers are all about?

I believe that the author means that vendors have been saying for a very long time that there is no cross-distribution place to keep config files, or set of environment variables, etc. What the Linux Standard Base was invented to address.

The problem is package managers aren't consistent across distributions. If you want to provide a binary version of your app, you should be providing at least .deb, .rpm and tarball packages.

In practice, everyone's just targeting Ubuntu and publishing .debs.

The basic problem there is that essencially all package formats are tar-balls, bit each one use a different way to note dependencies (and none of them seem to handle having multiple minor lib versions installed side by side).

Frankly though i no longer see the problem as most third parties are self contained in terms of dependencies, and .desktop files takes care of desktop integration.

After all, a binary do not need to sit in /bin to be executable.

And that is not enough, if the package needs to call distribution specific tools or access specific paths.

If App stores took inspiration from anywhere it was the iTunes music store and other similar digital media stores, although the first such system, the 'Electronic App Wrapper'[1] for NeXT, predates Linux, distros, OSX and iTunes. So maybe it's a more iterative process where digital software stores inspired iTunes, which in turn inspired the latest generation of App stores?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_AppWrapper

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