Using Zero Install

Website: http://0install.net/

Zero Install vs APT: (feel free to edit)

Advantages:
- No more problems with different versions of libraries or utilities. We can have them alongside. You can for example install both Firefox 3.6 and 8. Or gtk2 & 3 without renaming libs.
- Decentralised
- User can install apps (without using sudo or root account) and still be safe

Disadvantages:
- Needs some work if we want to switch to it
- Not so many packages available
- Dangerous if user installs random apps (the same applies to APT)

This gets us back to Windoze's installing random apps from the internet, and goes in the opposite direction than https://blueprints.launchpad.net/elementaryos/+spec/no-talks-to-strangers; I doubt this will pass. ~shnatsel

Well, there's not much difference between random apps (zero install) and random PPAs (current situation on Ubuntu). But this is easy to solve (for most of user base) by expanding official repos. We can cancel this blueprint, but the most important feature from those listed above is the ability to install few versions of one package at the same time. We should provide this ability. I see three ways to do it:
- Using Zero Install
- Altering APT
- Developing our own package system
I'm waiting for your ideas and thoughts. ~grzesiek1e5

We discussed moving to an alternate package format in this past and one big thing keeps hitting us in the face: third-party developers. Especially when we're talking about stuff like drivers, libraries, kernels, etc we really really need to be able to use the work of developers that may or may not have had elementary in mind at the time. Thanks to the popularity of Ubuntu, Deb is a widely accepted format and it will be for quite some time. Doing something like this is just too much work for too little gain (and in this case too big of loss as well). --DanRabbit