It’s a question that nags at anyone who has fallen in love with portable apps: why aren’t all applicati*** portable?

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问题

超级用户读者Tom喜欢便携式应用程序提供的干净组织，并想知道为什么所有东西都不可移植：

I’ve recently been trying to ‘install’ stuff a lot less on my Windows machine (I hate installers – I need to know where programs put stuff…), choosing to use portable or standalone versi*** of applicati*** instead.

I put them all in a ‘Programs’ dir on a drive separate from my Windows partition, so whenever I reinstall, I have all my applicati*** available with minimal effort and on the plus side, I get a nice clean setup.

Applicati*** like Office and Creative Suite still require me to go through a horribly long installation process where a thousand random libraries and tools are thrown across my system.

Why do Windows apps still need installing? Why can’t we just drag Photoshop to a folder à la OSX and just have it work? Does anyone else focus on portable apps, or am I just being OCD about the whole thing?

我们当然是便携式应用程序的粉丝，也希望了解事情的真相。

答案

超级用户撰稿人David Whitney提供了一些关于为什么许多应用程序不可移植以及Windows如何实施某种反可移植性安排的见解：

Installers are a result of years of evolution and a little bit of (simplified) history helps understand why they do what they do..

The Windows 3.1 model suggested config.ini style configuration files per application with supporting shared libaries going into system folders to prevent duplication and wasted disk space.

Windows 95 introduced the registry allowing a central store for application configuration replacing many configuration files. More importantly, windows configuration was stored in the same place.

The registry became bloated due to applicati*** not cleaning up after themselves. DLL hell happened as a result of multiple versi*** of the same shared libraries overwriting each other.

.NET introduced the concept of app.config (almost ini files mark 2, this time with a little more structure saving developers wasting time writing manual parsers). The GAC was introduced to version shared assemblies in an attempt to prevent DLL Hell.

In Windows XP and moreso in Vista, Microsoft attempted to define the userspace as a place to store user data and configuration files in a single standard location to allow for roamning profiles and easy migration (just copy your profile) with the applicati*** installed in Program Files.

So I guess, the reason is that “applicati*** in Windows are designed to live in one place, their shared dependencies in another, and the user specific data in another”, which pretty much works against the concept of xcopying a single location.

.. and that’s before you have to configure user accounts, and setup and ensure security permissi***, and download updates, and install windows services…

xcopy is the “simple case” and certainly isn’t a best fit for everything.

不幸的是，对于所有便携设备的爱好者来说，许多应用程序——尤其是像Office这样的大型应用程序——将仍然牢牢地固定在操作系统上并分布在整个操作系统中。

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