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by chriswarbo
3452 days ago
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Thanks, that's really interesting. I grew up with Amigas exclusively until getting a family PC around 2000, although I didn't tend to use the CLI or do any programming back then. I'm aware of BOOPSI, and the datatypes system which sounds similar to what you describe. One problem on AmigaOS was(/is?) the lack of packaging and dependencies, e.g. installing many programs on a fresh copy of Workbench won't work, due to missing libraries, etc. Thankfully that's easier to manage these days by scouring Google and Aminet, but it's still manual. Interestingly, I've found Amigas to become more stable over time, unlike e.g. Windows where some people recommend formatting every year or so to remove cruft. The more stuff you install in Workbench, the more libraries, etc. you accumulate, so the fewer problems you encounter trying to install/use other things. I'm not sure if this is a consequence of the OS design, or from developers bending over backwards to avoid problems (e.g. conflicting names, etc.) |
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> One problem on AmigaOS was(/is?)
Is, sort-of. Package managers didn't enter the scene until much later, but Commodore did release Installer, which while not a package manager provides a s-expression based mechanism for describing installation flow.
It's alleviated because Amiga libraries tends to very strictly insist on backwards compatibility, so you should generally be able to drop a newer version of a library over an older version and things will keep working (and the libraries and all compliant binaries contains version numbers).
But of course the community today is very small, and was smallish originally too, and so it's gotten easier and easier to deal with.
If there was to be a resurgence (there is new hardware but it's expensive niche PPC hardware; AROS runs on pretty much "anything", but is incomplete), it'd need a lot of big overhauls - in particular memory protection (some work is ongoing but it's hard due to AmigaOS APIs relying a lot on pointer passing) and SMP, but also lots of tooling we take for granted today like package management.
I'm not holding my breath for that, but I do wish more AmigaOS ideas will get picked up elsewhere. Linux still feels like a hodge-podge in comparison.