Posts Tagged ‘non-installation’

Non-installation

I came across this post today about the mess that is application installation on the modern operating system and why going back to the installation procedures (or lack thereof) of old systems are favorable.

While it’s useful to perform some kind of unpacking or decompression step as part of app setup (unzip), the idea of scattering application files into all sorts of mysterious places just makes things harder for everyone, developers and users included.

The nice thing about “non-installing” is that your entire app is in one place — pretty much just a copy of the distribution itself sitting right there. And, wouldn’t that be handy in itself, both in terms of backup and also for ease of app removal?

I couldn’t agree more and wrote something in a similar vein a while back (see here).