Yesterday, I was struggling with some repository introspection algorithms. I was pondering the recent discussion of bundle usage on the mailing lists. And I had an epiphany of sorts. It required some checking into. I now think there's a medium strength corollary to be found in all of it.

What my sampling seemed to indicate (I'm sure there are exceptions) is that whether shops prefer Bundles or not, is possibly related to how they deploy their end user applications.

Shops that are trying to do the build-up approach tend to steer clear of them. Shops that use the classical "create an application through some sort of image saving procedure" tend to embrace them. I could conjecture why that is, but it would be just that.

What is meant by build-up is to use something like base.im and then deploy applications as a set of Parcels which are loaded at runtime. It's like having a small .exe and a bunch of component .dll's. Or like the VSE mode of just deploying SLL's.