I think many of you read the recent announcements and blog posts about “GNOME-Apps”, like this one. Initially I wanted to be at FOSDEM and attend the GNOME hackfest were this was discussed too, but university binds me here so I was unable to come (which is really unfortunate).

Some people asked me what the GNOME-App-Bundles mean for Listaller. The GNOME bundle proposal will make cross-distro application deployment for GNOME apps possible, and this essentially the same goal as the one of Listaller. So it is reasonable to question the future of Listaller when GNOME enforces their App Bundles (because most distros ship GNOME, most distros will have the app bundle support, which means people will use it because they can rely on it being present). Instead of answering the same questions again and again via private mail (remember, there is a new public Listaller mailinglist available, replacing the old Google Group) I’ll write this post.

In my opinion, there is no reason to worry about Listaller. I think the Listaller approach of app-directories and shared resources is much better than having app bundles mounted via FUSE. When Listaller was started, the Klik project already existed (Klik is dead now, Glick2 was developed by Alexander Larsson as replacement. Glick and Listaller nearly have the same age (I think Listaller might be older, when counting the first experiemnts…), so this is no case of “re-inventing” the wheel on both sides.). I initially wanted to contribute to Klik. However, FUSE-mounted app bundles have certain problems:

• No system integration: It is incredibly complicated to integrate the bundled apps with the system, e.g. if an application wants to register mimetypes.
• The way of “installing” app bundles is odd for most users, and having apps lying around in random directories is not really nice.
• App bundles can’t easily share resources. This means every app bundle has to provide all it’s dependencies again, while maybe another bundle already provides them (wastes lots of space).
• Auto-updating bundles is not possible (you simply have to re-download the new app version and replace the old bundle)
• Because every app provides it’s own dependencies, security updates provided by the distribution for a certain library won’t automatically be applied to bundled applications, which makes them a potential security risk.
• (The GNOME-Apps stuff is planned GNOME-only at time (nobody can blame anyone for that). A cross-desktop solution would be much better)

Listaller, on the contrary, integrates nicely with the system. Applications installed with Listaller will show up in every Software Center which uses PackageKit. The regular system updater is able to update Listaller applications as well as distribution components, and the Listaller dependency solver will always prefer distribution packages to satisfy dependencies, before falling back to other solutions. This tight platform integration is also one of the main reasons why Listaller is different from ZeroInstall (Listaller is also Linux-only, while ZeroInstall is not – both projects cover slightly different user-cases).

In order to have these advantages, Listaller requires all applications to be relocatable, while Glick2 does not require that (which …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE