Please see this thread for information about the Application Manager Portable project. This posting is no longer relevant.
Hello all,
A friend just told me about the Portable Apps Suite, so I downloaded it and gave it a try. It's an interesting system, but I'd like to suggest the addition of a "package management" system such as Debian's APT to facilitate application installs, removals, and upgrades.
For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of using Linux, you can have a look at Cygwin; its setup.exe tool is, while admittedly far too complex, a reasonable model for such a system.
These are the benefits such a system might provide:
- At the touch of a button, gain easy access to a list of Portable Apps, and quickly install new applications
- Automatically upgrade launchers and applications
- Quickly uninstall applications
The .paf.exe system is a first step in this direction; a central repository of sorts could be created, with the ability to add others as needed. Considering the tremendous amount of bandwidth required, SourceForge could serve as a repository, with automatic load-balancing based on geographic location (the current download system already works this way).
Separation of executables and data might be required by this system so that upgrades don't overwrite current settings; if this is the case, something similar to *nix's /usr/bin and /home folders could be implemented.
Just a thought.
Rick Smith // Paladin225