Installation-free deployment

Starkits and tclkit builds are designed to be installation-free.

This means that one only copies or downloads these as individual files, and they immediately become usable. One important aspect of this is that starkit applications do not create lots of files on the target machine.

It can be summarized as:

install == cp
uninstall == rm

There are no registry settings (unless the application introduces them), there are no files strewn out all over the disk, and there is no need to have superuser priviliges to start using starkits.

The main benefits of this approach are:

applications can be used out-of-the-box
applications can be launched from CDROMs and read-only servers
applications do not break because some file was (re)moved
applications do not interfere with other packages
applications can easily be moved to another machine
there are no hairy version dependencies or conflicts
backups are easy to make
removing applications is easy and quick