It's been big news throughout Linuxland that Canonical's planning for mobile Ubuntu (let's call it Mobuntu) may include an application packaging system which sounds like it has more in common with Apple's Mac OS X, and iOS, than with Linux.
According to this mailing list posting by Colin Watson -- Canonical's Ubuntu Installer Team leader -- The Ubuntu phone/tablet could get a new, simplified packaging format and app installer, in line with the lightweight nature of Ubuntu mobile apps. The new packaging format, called "Click packages" would have no dependencies between applications, no maintainer scripts and each app would be installed in its own directory. That certainly doesn't sound like your grandfather's Linux, although it sounds almost exactly like the innovative, but currently quiescent GoboLinux, and It sounds a lot like what goes on inside a MacBook Pro, or an iPhone.
The installation system, which Watson has already prototyped, in a mere 300 lines of Python code, promises to be fast, small, and portable to other operating systems. The assumption has been that "other" operating systems refers to Windows, and iOS, but I think it also refers to desktop Ubuntu. It's being made plain that "Click Packages" is designed to work alongside the desktop Ubuntu's Debian-derived dpkg and apt package-management tools. So while it may start out just on the mobile/touch version of Ubuntu. who's to say where Canonical wants it to end up. The Unity Desktop Environment was originally designed just for the netbook remix of Ubuntu, and look how that went.
This Register item sees the new packaging system as another step in Canonical's move away from the Linux mainstream, which has seen them replacing community components with their own in-house solutions, such as adopting their own desktop environment (Unity), and recently announcing their own graphics engine (Mir).
One question I have, is how similar, or dissimilar, Click Packages is to the Android Application Package File (APK). After all, Android is Linux for mobile phones. It seems as though an APK contains everything an app need to run, but Wikipedia compares it to a Deb package, and that doesn't contain everything. It's beyond me. But, frankly, it's beyond me what Canonical thinks Ubuntu will bring to phones that Android doesn't, unless it's actually about what phones can bring to Canonical.
According to this mailing list posting by Colin Watson -- Canonical's Ubuntu Installer Team leader -- The Ubuntu phone/tablet could get a new, simplified packaging format and app installer, in line with the lightweight nature of Ubuntu mobile apps. The new packaging format, called "Click packages" would have no dependencies between applications, no maintainer scripts and each app would be installed in its own directory. That certainly doesn't sound like your grandfather's Linux, although it sounds almost exactly like the innovative, but currently quiescent GoboLinux, and It sounds a lot like what goes on inside a MacBook Pro, or an iPhone.
The installation system, which Watson has already prototyped, in a mere 300 lines of Python code, promises to be fast, small, and portable to other operating systems. The assumption has been that "other" operating systems refers to Windows, and iOS, but I think it also refers to desktop Ubuntu. It's being made plain that "Click Packages" is designed to work alongside the desktop Ubuntu's Debian-derived dpkg and apt package-management tools. So while it may start out just on the mobile/touch version of Ubuntu. who's to say where Canonical wants it to end up. The Unity Desktop Environment was originally designed just for the netbook remix of Ubuntu, and look how that went.
This Register item sees the new packaging system as another step in Canonical's move away from the Linux mainstream, which has seen them replacing community components with their own in-house solutions, such as adopting their own desktop environment (Unity), and recently announcing their own graphics engine (Mir).
One question I have, is how similar, or dissimilar, Click Packages is to the Android Application Package File (APK). After all, Android is Linux for mobile phones. It seems as though an APK contains everything an app need to run, but Wikipedia compares it to a Deb package, and that doesn't contain everything. It's beyond me. But, frankly, it's beyond me what Canonical thinks Ubuntu will bring to phones that Android doesn't, unless it's actually about what phones can bring to Canonical.
Doesn't this sound like Android applications are totally self-contained? ►
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