[E-Lang] Pet Extensions and such (was: what is good about E?)

[Marc Stiegler]

> I agree with MarcS (sorry about misspelling your name on the previous
> message) that Chris has a good idea here with bundles. For it to work
there
> would need to be standard meanings to these bundles. I guess that would be
> the job of the OS to provide nice names and descriptions of useful
> collections of capabilities, right?

Probably. It is certainly the job of someone and something that sits close
to the OS. I am hesitant because there are several different views on how
installers themselves should be installed, and several different definitions
of what constitutes a part of the OS :-) My current plan is to create an
installer, not as a part of the TCB, but rather as a caplet--a caplet that
has extensive authority, but not total authority. So I don't know whether it
would appropriately be called part of the OS or not, though this first
installer for the E Language Machine will have been written by a member of
the OS team :-) Anyway, if my current vision can be achieved, it will be
possible for third parties to write alternative installers that are not TCB,
and so probably are not part of the OS, though you still really need to
trust the people whose installer you install :-) Installing an installer is
NOT a best first exercise for grandmothers :-)

Markm and I haven't even really hammered the issues with installers to the
point of a clear shared vision for a v1.0 system, though we have the
beginnings of such a vision. Ping has other views on installers that I
haven't argued with him about enough yet, and Jonathan had a pretty lively
thread with yet other views over on eros-os:

http://www.eros-os.org/pipermail/eros-arch/2001-March/002907.html

Ironically, though most of the people in that thread seemed to agree with
each other that each application writer needed to be able to write his own
custom installer app, upon reading the discussion as it existed a couple
months ago, they had convinced me that I was correct that doing a single
installer as "part of the OS" (sort of) was the right way to go.



--marcs