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Comment by drbig | Hacker News Reader

I still long for the approach many software used on the AmigaOS - the app is a folder, the folder has the main exec and any assets it needs (libraries, images, etc.) and documentation and... That's it.

Install? Copy the directory to where you like. Uninstall? Delete the directory.

And if you wish you could keep any files used/generated with such an app in the same folder, making it 100% self-contained.

I remember being rather grossed out when I learnt Windows has "a registry" (that was a long time ago). "Why would you have a global registry? Whatever preferences a piece of software has they should live where the exe is".

(and yes, I am aware AmigaOS had an installer and dir structure not that unlike of Unix, with `sys:`, `devs:` and so on)

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To be fair, Windows applications can be designed to be installable this way: a single executable, with everything it needs sitting next to it in the folder. Even better, a single executable with no other dependent files at all! Lots of little utilities used to be distributed this way. But many developers deliberately choose to structure their monster such that it needs to spread its tentacles all over the filesystem for it to work.

And for legacy/backward compatibility reasons, once MS allowed this behavior to go unchecked, there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle and stop it, without giving up backward compatibility. It didn't help that Microsoft software tended to be the "tentacle" kind as well.

It sounds great but there are simple use cases where the "portable" app isn't enough. For example, if you want multiple users to be able to use the program and have their own settings, you need something to be saved to the user folder. Or, if you want any basic interaction with the system (run on startup, run from a browser address, etc), you need to start messing with the registry.

So in theory apps could be distributed portable .exes but in practice Windows doesn't any ways of interacting with the rest of the system that are that nice.

I still love most aspects of the Amiga user experience, but a lot of Amiga applications would need libraries installed to Libs: and deleting the application's "drawer" would leave those libraries behind. (Having said that, by default libs: is assigned to sys:libs but you could assign extra targets, so that libraries would be sought from application-specific directories.)

Also, it suffers from the same problem as Windows here, in that you can't delete a file or directory which is currently open. The executable itself wouldn't be open after launch is complete (with the possible exception of overlay executables, but they were pretty rare) but the directory would be locked for as long as it was the program's current directory. If a subdirectory with app-specific libraries was assigned to Libs: that would also prevent deletion.

This is how a lot of apps on MacOS still work.

Sort of. They still leave garbage behind in ~/Library though.

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