| I am a contributor, and I use it all the time. I publish a lot of my own stuff (mostly small utilities / libraries) at http://gfxmonk.net/dist/0install/index/, as well as a bunch of third-party software. Making distro-specific packages for all of these would be a stupid amount of effort - with a single zeroinstall feed I can run cross-platform code without having to package it N different times. It is fairly easy to package / distribute portable code (e.g python, ruby, perl, js, etc). Stuff that requires compilation tends to be trickier, unfortunately (both to use and to distribute). Compiled software that is not relocatable (i.e hard codes paths) is sadly not possible to package in ZeroInstall. It can use system packages (e.g apt, yum, etc) when available. So you can make a simple feed for your code that just depends on system versions of your dependencies, rather than having to "package the world". Of course, this only works on linux (and maybe OSX with fink / ports, but those tend to be less reliable than linux packages). The big downside is of course that users don't generally know about ZeroInstall, and aren't likely to care why you think it's great. I generally recommend using ZeroInstall whenever I can in my own READMEs, but I have had little feedback on whether this has actually convinced anyone. It has some definite upsides though, which is why I don't expect to stop using it myself regardless of general uptake: - end users who aren't comfortable with terminals can use it just fine, yet it's as easy to publish as something like `pip` or `npm` packages. - Since ZeroInstall feeds don't install anything globally, using zeroinstall dependencies during development means you never have to bother with tools like rvm, virtualenv, etc again. - The savings that I personally get from having my own software & tools immediately available anywhere I go is already worth the effort of packaging it for ZeroInstall. E.g I have a "tim's custom vim" feed, with dependencies on all my vim plugins and configuration, and running it doesn't touch the host system's .vimrc or anything. That's pretty damn cool, even though it's only useful to me. - I really like the notion that if you can _run_ some code, you can _modify_ that code. I despise the jump in most software between the "install & run" steps, and the "oh, you have to do these 10 manual and rather invasive steps to set up a development environment for this code". 0compile fixes this, for feeds that make use of it. |
- The 0install feed for your customized vim install, can you link to it?
- Out of curiosity, have you contributed to the Python and OCaml versions, or only one? If one, which?
UPDATE: For others interested, obviously your 0install feed what onerous to find, haha.
http://gfxmonk.net/dist/0install/index/