Welcome to glick, a runtime-less application bundle system for linux

Glick is an application that lets developers easily create application bundles of their applications. An application bundle is a single file that contains all the data and files needed to run an application, so all the user has to do is start it. There is no need to install it, and if you don't like it you can just remove that file and the whole program will be gone.

There are some interesting aspecs of the glick implementation of application bundles:

There is no specific runtime that needs to be installed on the target systems. As long as fuse is correctly installed an set up on the system just should not need anything but the bundle.

The application installed in the bundle doesn't have to be relocatable. Glick uses a trick with the /proc/self magic link to find its files via an absolute pathname (/proc/self/fd/1023). This means that you don't have to modify applications to work with glick, just build then with "configure --prefix /proc/self/fd/1023".

You can embed icons and desktop files into the target program file. These are stored as separate ELF sections and are very easy to extract.

For more information on how to use glick, see the README file in the sources.

ChangeLog

Fix a problem in the fuse filesystem that only allowed you to open 10 files.

Fix argument order in the README example

Sources

The code is also availible via git at: http://www.gnome.org/~alexl/git/glick.git/

Alexander Larsson, alexl@redhat.com