Zeroinstall, the original snap model

We briefly mentioned Zeroinstall elsewhere in this article, but it’s an interesting project and is worth a little more of your time.

To install a program with zeroinstall, you use a public web address where the publisher has put the software. When you run the GUI, you’ll find that there’s no ‘install’ option. This is because packages run from a single directory. Similar to snap, zeroinstall will place all files you need in one folder. The vital difference is that the cache is under your user directory, usually with your permissions in place.

Since you’re the only one with permission to run these files, another user on the system can’t use the application and will be forced to download its own version.

In your home computer, this won’t be an issue usually. However, Zeroinstall supports sharing of these files between different users and even virtual machines. To make sharing secure, zeroinstall checks the software against the sha signatures included by the designer, or the package maintainer if the two differ.

The contents of the xml file for distributing applications is simple, because the file only consists of 10 components. This makes maintaining a zeroinstall file a relatively straightforward task. However, bear in mind that you’d have to have a web address set up specifically for the program.