{"id":283,"date":"2006-09-24T20:39:33","date_gmt":"2006-09-24T20:39:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tromey.com\/blog\/?p=283"},"modified":"2006-09-24T20:39:33","modified_gmt":"2006-09-24T20:39:33","slug":"gnome-deployment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tromey.com\/blog\/?p=283","title":{"rendered":"Gnome Deployment"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was reading about Gnome 3.0 recently (and I’m working on a long post about it), when I ran across a post by Luis Villa<\/a> about Gnome versus web development. (BTW you should read his blog if you don’t already.)<\/p>\n

I found this pretty compelling in general — it is a nice analysis and it is also a list of things that can actually be addressed without going crazy.<\/p>\n

I’m interested in the deployment issue, since I’ve done some playing in this area with Java Web Start. And, though I think I don’t agree that this is really a blocker, it is still fun to think about a bit — the technology is fun and cool, I’m just not convinced it solves a pressing problem. (Your response here…)<\/p>\n

First, yes, with C or C++ I think deployment is just going to continue to suck.<\/p>\n

Java already solved this problem in a pretty nice way. It is no big deal to write a single-click install, with automatic updating, good security (either a sandbox or signatures for apps that need more permissions), etc. This could use a little work for better Gnome integration, and of course we should be shipping this in Fedora, but the amount of needed work here is quite small. (I assume C# has something similar but I really don’t know.)<\/p>\n

I looked into this for Python a little this weekend. And, it looks like Python Eggs and the Python cheese shop<\/a> provide a nice basis to make this work. Finishing this is pretty concrete:<\/p>\n