App installer design: click packages

[Alejandro J. Cura]

Colin Watson wrote on 08/05/13 11:14:
> Is there anything else people can think of that a system like this
> needs to consider?

This thread assumes that packages need to be uncompressed and
installed before usage, so I'd like to ask if there was any discussion
re: using something like squashfs images as the distributed packages
instead of a zip or tar-like file.

This would mean that such downloaded images can be mounted read-only
by whatever launches applications, using nosuid, nodev, and with the
required uid, and then run immediately, instead of having to go thru a
copy of files from the package to the storage, which slows down
installation and usually requires double the storage space.

I'm surely missing some bits of the picture, so please flame me if
that's the case.

cheers,
--
alecu