You are thinking about the current state of things. Instead, I'm thinking about a hypothetical situation.Because GNU/Linux is not Windows, and installing software doesn't work the way it does on Windows.Why does APT install programs instead of just downloading them?
"distribution of the files around the file system" is covered by the FHS. Files on GNU/Linux (and many other unix-like operating systems) are placed according to what they do and who needs to access them, not which application they belong to.
Some applications can run from a self-contained directory if they are configured to do so at compile time and/or bundle their own copies of libraries, but most expect to be installed in standard FHS locations because they rely on system facilities for binary search paths, dynamic linking etc.
Appimage, snap, flatpak & co. are another thing entirely and contain an FHS compliant directory structure of their own, complete with massive duplication of libraries and other needless complication that's well out of scope here.
This scenario involves the presence of dependencies only on the machine, packages distributed as archives without libraries but which link those on the machine and finally a package manager that downloads the archives and manages the dependencies without installing anything.
It seems to me to be technically possible and even simpler.
I cannot understand why the current path was preferred, what are the advantages compared to the scenario I described above.
Statistics: Posted by Texlee — 2024-01-16 17:22