Installing Everywhere?

PlainBlack queries: "Our company has been developing an open source project for a couple years now that has gotten pretty popular. The one thing we haven't yet figured out how to do well is packaging. It seems like every operating system has it's own standards for packaging, and installers, and for each OS we support, we end up adding a lot of time to our packaging process. So my question is, what do all of you do to package your apps? Do you just release source tarballs? Do you manually package your RPMs, EXEs, DEBs, DMGs, BINs, PKGs, [and MSIs] by hand? Do you have an automated build process that creates all the packages? If so, how does it work? Is it available for other developers to use?" There are tons of installers listed on SourceForge, but which one allows the creation of OS packages without too much hassle? Duplicating work, especially software installation procedures, across all supported OSes, is time consuming. Is there an easier way?

Comments

Use industry solutions

[Anonymous Coward]

InstallShield and Wise are perhaps the best-known products for deployment management. Use the professional products, they might add a little to the bottom line of the products, but will save hours of support time from angry users calling and asking where they can get the missing library.

Or switch to Java/.NET, lots of issues related to DLL Hell have been solved there.

BSD is Dying.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't you see???

How can you peeople sleep at night, knowing that BSD is Dying? Or is it dead yet? AHHH!!

Re:Speaking of Packaging.

[Anonymous Coward]

well, i'll get them and a few others out of the way for you:

• .NET sucks
  
• use Java
  
• use Python
  
• use perl;
  
• real hackers use C
  
• real programmers use C++
  

good luck!