How to Make Easy-to-Package Software, Part 2

jmmv writes "A month ago (more or less), the first part of the Making packager-friendly software was published and announced here; it seemed to be warmly accepted by the community. Now it's the turn for the second (and last) part, which has just seen the light. It deals with problems caused by recursive dependencies, configuration file handling, unprivileged builds, the make utility, build infrastructure oddities and some notes about code portability. Of course, these are just suggestions to try to make the life of packagers a bit simpler; you can just ignore them if you want to. I hope it will be of interest and that future versions of your creations are easier to package. Thanks!"

Comments

Installers

[Umbral Blot]

You have to admit, no matter how much you like Linux, that both windows and mac have done a much better job with their installers. I can whip up an installer in a few minutes on windows that I am confident will work on everyone's machine, but this is unfortunately not true in Linux.

Re:Installers

[0racle]

Old fashioned? Thats the whole reason I run Slackware.

Re:Installers

[jatreuman]

This really isn't any surprise when you consider how varying Linux distros can be, and how similiar installations of Windows are. In practice however, a binary will work on any Linux distro of the same architecture provided the required libraries are available, which makes this a dependency issue. Windows avoids this by providing many commonly used functions as part of a base install, while Linux distros make these (and many more) optional. If Microsoft doesn't provide a needed function, the programmer either codes it themselves or includes a third party library as part of the installer. Of course, this has it's disadvantages:

• A bloated base operating system with libraries you may not need (though in practice, many of the built in applications that your average joe uses depend on them), and
• programmers waste time reimplementing functions that Microsoft does not provide, or
• installers install DLLs globally and you have DLL Hell, or
• installers waste disk space and memory by installing DLLs in their application directory.

The last group could be avoided by installing DLLs globally with versioned filenames, but I guess that would be too unixy. :P

The fact that Windows doesn't provide an installation system is also a big minus. For example, installing firefox with flash support on Gentoo:

• emerge firefox netscape-flash

And on Windows:

• Run MSIE
• Google for firefox, because you don't have the URI memorized
• Download installer
• Run installer
• Go through installation wizard (3 steps minimum, IIRC)
• Run firefox
• Google for macromedia flash
• Download installer
• Run installer
• Go through installation process (which I can't remember)
• Restart firefox

I don't know about you, but I think the Gentoo way is easier. Sure it'll pull in dependencies, and spend a good while building it all. But apt, and other binary packaging systems I'm not familiar with, can be just as good, and in most cases will be faster even when grabbing dependencies.

Yes but what will your installer *break*?

[leonbrooks]

For a self-contained YAKoSoSBP<*>, no worries, but for anything serious you have to futz around lots to avoid DLL collisions and registry slapdown games. On Linux or BSD, I just put in the dependencies and let URPMI/yum/apt/YAST sort it out. Different versions of shared libraries are delighted to coexist, BoC you don't need to do that, see below.

Anyway, why do you need to ship an installer at all, isn't the OS supposed to provide that kind of plumbing? And what happens when the user gets to WinCE on ARM or something like that? I can post a .src.rpm for people whose distros or architectures I haven't explicitly packaged for, can you? The .src.rpm also allows seamless integration with systems running on odd versions of shardd libraries, one simply does a wone-liner (or one-click) rebuild of the offending .src.rpm and viola, all dependencies solved.

<*> YAKoSoSBP == Yet Another Kind of Solitaire or Sliding Block Puzzle