Postal 2/mac is now available for sale online with digital download, which is
nice for impulse buying, night dwellers, and people that live in countries
where it's banned. Please note that the Apolocalypse Weekend version here
can't be used with any other version of Share the Pain (so if you want both,
get them both from deliver2mac.com).
Check it, and other games here:
http://deliver2mac.com/Other stuff:
So I've been thinking about some things that Mac OS X happens to do really
well that Linux could benefit from stealing. Not the Expose' thing, although,
yeah, that too...I'm thinking at a more boring, plumbing level.
- Fat/Universal binaries. It would be interesting if Linux could plug more
than one architecture into one binary...it would making shipping binaries
easier, perhaps, but it would also solve the whole /lib, /lib32, /lib64
mess on amd64 systems. Solving this would probably need a fake architecture
defined in the ELF format: instead of an x86 or PowerPC ELF file, you get
a "container" ELF file, which has a segment for each real architecture
contained in the file...each segment being a full ELF file in itself. We'd
have to patch some tools and the kernel, and write a few new ones like an
equivalent of Apple's "lipo" tool, but I don't think it would be enormous
amounts of work. (yeah, what could possibly go wrong?)
- Launch Services. It would be really nice if there was an equivalent of
the Mac's "Application Bundles" on Linux...If you have a directory that has
the ".app" extension, the Desktop Environments treat it as a single file as
far as the end-user is concerned, but lets us pack all our datafiles behind
one icon. More importantly, it lets us store some standard metadata about
what the app can do, regardless of the filesystem...this would be your
equivalent of Info.plist. Then we have a daemon that sits there waiting
for the kernel to send it notice over D-bus when files are changed. If it's
an app bundle, it updates a database. Then other processes can talk to this
daemon and say "Can you launch whatever handles PDF file viewing?" or "can
you launch whatever handles FTP connections?" or "can you launch the user's
preferred email composition program?" ... or "can you tell me where
Unreal Tournament is installed, even if the user moved it after the initial
installation?" 9/10ths of the cases can be handled by an equivalent of
Apple's "open" command. This would be generally useful, and also make
interoperability between Gnome and KDE suck less.
- Disk images. Ok, we already have these, sort of, but it would be great if
these could be downloaded and mounted cleanly. Right now we can't ship
anything self-executable on Linux, like, say, an installer, because it
doesn't keep the executable bit when you download the thing. There's nothing
worse than having to tell someone "okay, download this, then open a terminal
and type in 'chmod u+x filename' ..." disk images solve this by the nature
of shipping with their own list of file permissions internally, but also let
us do things like, say, ship an executable plus some shared libraries as one
download, and, in a really Mac-like way: we may not even need an installer
in these cases: just open the disk image, and drag the thing where you
need it. Now that would be sharp.
- Case-insensitive filesystems. Time to let it go, people. Ironically, I bet
that Mac OS X, a popular Unix-like system with a case-insensitive
filesystem, probably resulted in a lot of open source packages being fixed
already...all those packages with an "install" script and "INSTALL" readme.
Autotools, I'm glaring at you here.
--ryan.