A from-scratch operating system with no applications is a demo. Rather than ask the world to package for us, Division Store reads the formats the world already ships — and rebuilds each program against the layout this system uses.
Rip, place, declare
An install does three things. It rips the program out of whatever container it arrived in. It places every shared object into the one library store and everything else into the program's own folder. Then it writes a manifest describing what the program is and what it needs.
Installing is not running
Division Store never launches anything. A separate runner reads the manifest and starts the program, and prism resolves each library from the store as it opens. Keeping those apart means an install can be inspected before anything executes.
Where software comes from
Providers are read directly — package indexes are resolved, the dependency closure is computed from the binaries themselves rather than trusted from metadata, and anything missing is fetched before the first launch instead of discovered during it.
- No per-program special cases. A fix is made at the level of the whole class.
- No bundled copies — a program's libraries are the machine's libraries.
- Programs that never heard of DivisionOS run without patching them.