Zero Install: Goals

Zero Install: Goals: "You don't have to be root just to install a word-processor, or its documentation. Most packaging systems only allow the root user to install software.
Traditionally, if a user needs a package that isn't installed, they just get an error message. In the screenshot, the system administrator must install the openoffice.org-help package before the user can read the documentation, or the user must install from source and handle any dependencies themselves. On a Zero Install system, Zero Install would have offered to download the documentation when the user selected Help.
Of course, Debian could fix this particular problem by making the OpenOffice package depend on the documentation package. But then, installing OpenOffice would require far more disk space if you didn't need the documentation (and most of the time, for most versions of most software packages, you don't need the documentation... but an administrator can't know ahead of time what will be needed by their users). Also, users still wouldn't be able to install OpenOffice itself in the first place."