Howdy,
Stephan Assmus wrote:
Why do you need to know where the software is installed? What are your
use-cases for that?
For me, the beauty of BeOS was its transparency and no-nonsense
manageability to all my files -- be it data or applications -- that it
gave me as a user. As a user, in BeOS you either knew -- or could figure
out very easily -- where your data and apps were actually located in
your computer, and it was easy to move things around w/o breaking the
system; this made me feel I was in charge and full control of my system
and not the other way around.
One thing that I think contributes to this is that BeOS/Haiku offers a
one to one relationship between the data objects that you deal with as a
user. So instead of obscure abstractions of multiple data objects that
nobody knows where they are located, you have data files that directly
relate to the data that actually matters to you. A good example would be
the ".mozilla-thunderbird/?????.default/Mail/*" folders in an Ubuntu
installation vs. the "/home/email" folders in BeOS/Haiku: in the case of
Haiku, each one of your email messages are ready to be opened via a
simple double-click, or to be backed up by a simple copy operation, or
queried by the FS for whatever purpose you want.
I think Haiku should look into this uniqueness (and strength IMO) for
clues on how to manage applications. In that vein, some sort of
self-contained app object such as the proposed bundles (or even simply
folders? or PCD-BSD's PBI?) would offer the end user similar ease and
manageability when dealing with apps. This would make it very easy to
move things around for whatever the user's particular circumstances
require, such as repartitioning an HDD, moving apps from one PC to
another, backing up data/apps, or simply reorganizing files in your system.
I am not a programmer, so I have no clue about the technical details
(yeah, I know, talk is cheap). I just hope Haiku lives up to its claims
of offering a user experience that is "free of any unnecessary
complexities" and gives proper thought to preserving the BeOS way of
putting the user in control of the computer and not the other way around.
