Comment by peterwwillis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peterwwillis | Hacker News Reader

It seems like FOSS and Unix-related software development was never held accountable to customers so it never made uniformity - or even reliability - a requirement. If something doesn't work, it's not my fault! It's one of the thousands of other products I depend upon that aren't shipped with an operating system that's to blame. It worked for me is the cry of the guilty developer.

You'll notice that Windows development follows a model based on at least the principles that code isn't cheap and you are accountable to a customer. Even Freeware is developed with a mentality that ensures the shipped application will work as well as it can without the customer needing to do anything. Duplicated code becomes a requirement (when you can find code to duplicate) and dependencies are non-existent.

The idea that you have go get some other product and install it to make a Windows app work would be absurd to a user. Yet in the FOSS world, it's absurd not to assume this. There's also some expectation of payment from one of these users. Could it not be that the quality and usability of FOSS could benefit from more commerce?

You're not old enough to remember how "InstallShield" came about, are you ? :-)

Nope. Care to enlighten?

(Regardless of what may have prompted its development, its use since around 1992 doesn't really discredit my point... It takes care of things for the user that FOSS doesn't deal with, or at least not in a portable way)

InstallShield was a created by a startup, to give windows-apps a non-insane way of installing themselves.

Microsoft was forced to buy them, almost at gunpoint, by 3rd. party software developers.

Cool. Now if only FOSS would adopt a non-insane way of installing software...

100% agreement from here. Andoids idea of a uid per app is a good place to start.

Part of me wonders if git provides a hint here... What about a sha1 hash per app?

You mean like by having package managers that are built into the OS distribution that can install the applications you want with a single command?

That's not a software installer. That's a distribution-specific package manager. Huge difference.

Commercial software for Linux typically does not come as a package. It starts with some kind of shell script and shoves itself into a corner of the filesystem (usually /opt/$PRODUCT/), and generally ships all its dependencies and does the work of mangling init to work on whatever distribution it's being shoehorned into. If it's a particularly expensive product it might have a GUI or ncurses installer or configuration wizard.

That's retarded, but it's still better than having a half dozen independent binary formats and a hundred distribution-specific packages.

If distribution managers would stop being asshats they would all agree on a set of APIs that they could support to perform operations in a platform-agnostic way, and software developers could in a free-market way make installer tools that work with the API. So you could have a shitty Gnome installer, a shitty KDE installer, a shitty ncurses installer, and an installer that uses Java just for the hell of it.

Packages are not things which users should ever have to touch. They are a specific collection of meta-information for the operating system to do mediocre actions like removing files, copying files, understanding if it has everything it needs to run some files, and telling you what the hell is installed. Packages certainly are not intended to hold a user's hand or provide all dependencies in and of themselves. But that's what you need if you want your users to be able to just install the damn software.

Solaris DStream packages have this wonderful ability to contain multiple packages in themselves, so you can install one or more select packages, or all of them if you need to. The easiest way to ship your application is to provide all the dependent packages in the DStream, and if you need one, you install it. This works great for Solaris (even if you have a bunch of different Solaris versions), but would be completely impractical for Linux because there's so many damn Linux distributions even if they have the same binary package format.

Most Linux software out there (assuming the kernel version is right and the glibc ABI hasn't changed) will work on other Linux distributions without code changes. But we waste all this time just making it work on other distros after the code has been compiled! Does that seem right to you? That because distributions want to live in a silo and do things their own way, you have to spend hours (or days) finicking with independent distributions just to release a new minor version of your app that everyone can use? For a bunch of really smart people we end up doing some stupid things.

Commercial software can be distributed through the package managers, though you do have to tell the users to add archive sources for those or they have to provide those packages. We do see some of this being done.

One thing its useful to keep in mind, is that the different parent distributions are more-or-less different operating systems. They don't have differences because they are special snowflakes. Comparing the deployment story for trying to write a package compatible with every Linux distribution to Windows 32-bit applications is not really apples to apples.

"apt-get install <name of package>" is about as good as software installation gets

Actually there's much better, but none that are freely available. And it's still distribution-specific which is retarded.

I don't think they were ever acquired by Microsoft. Perhaps you're thinking of Macrovision.

They've gone through several company names and changes in ownership: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InstallShield

A minor point, but this is wrong in several ways.

InstallShield was never acquired by Microsoft, and was never actually very good. You can think of it as being a leaky abstraction over the underlying horror of Windows Installer, allowing just enough to poke through that it was unreliable. There has never been a really sane way to install windows apps, and there still isn't - the closest approximation today is WiX.

Possibly the manifest-based Windows 8 application packages provide a better story, I'm not familiar enough to say.

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