
In Windows, the directory is the application bundle - ghurlman
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/06/20/10176772.aspx
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halo
Sadly, it's not a great solution.

It's not very user-friendly. Having stand-alone applications and double-
clicking them is nice, having to extract and add your own shortcut to the
executable isn't.

Distributing directories over the web sucks.

Both of these problems result in installers which encourage other undesirable
behaviours (think: shared libraries, using the registry).

Users can't be sure that applications are standalone, meaning end users don't
get most of the advantages of bundles because you can't rely on them working.

Without top-down guidance or enforcement, developers will do whatever the hell
is convenient for them without regard to what's good for the end user. The New
Old Thing has detailed this principle again and again over the years.

On top of that, many developers don't even like to accept that the shared
dependency issue has, in practice, mostly been solved by not sharing
dependencies and that the reasons against sharing libraries generally aren't
comeplling anymore. I'm still grumbling that the developers of Haiku think
that implementating a package manager with dependency resolution is a good
idea when everyone else has figured out that it isn't years ago.

(Note: Linux is an exception. Package management with dependency resolution is
necessary because Linux as an operating system is ultimately a web of
interweaving dependencies rather than a coherent whole. It's a necessary, if
not ideal, workaround for the problem.)

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snorkel
True that the resources for Windows apps can all reside in a single directory,
but Mac OS wins because it enforced a more consistent standard with treating
app bundles as self-contained applications and encouraging Mac developers to
follow that example, which has yielded a more consistent user experience when
installing and removing apps. Windows developers have had too many
installation strategies to choose from, with little help from Microsoft
(Microsoft once offered a weak setup toolkit on MSDN but Windows never really
had a consistent built-in app installation API, not even a simple copyfile()
function was provided by the OS) and thus every Windows app install and remove
process is entirely different, there's even a market for competing app install
toolkits in Windows, which describes the overall user experience in Windows:
inconsistent.

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jameskilton
The very title is wrong.

I can't double-click a directory to run the program contained inside that
directory. The system also doesn't recognize a directory as a "program" at
all, it's just a file system directory.

Windows doesn't have package management. Period. Trying to rename something to
look like a "package" is disingenuous.

~~~
smackfu
So Windows should have just had AutoPlay for directories, like they did for
CDs.

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teilo
It is true that a Mac's application bundle is preferable to Window's entirely
undefined method of organizing apps. However, it is just not true to say that
the bundle solves all the app installation and removal issues. Any given app
can have files in a number of different locations under /Library. To really
remove an app, it is necessary to remove all files under Application Settings,
Extensions, Preferences, Launch Daemons, etc. Some apps even place their files
in the verboten /Library/System/Extensions, or add files to /usr/local.

All-in-all it is still somewhat better than Windows, where it is still
possible for apps to dump DLLs directly into C:\Windows\System32. Most Mac
apps obey the convention that /System means what it says: It's for Apple-
supplied system files and is not to be touched by anything else. Regardless,
it's still a pain to remove apps on a Mac, especially since there is still no
standardized or centralized method for doing so.

