Best Cross-Distro Installation Tools for Linux?

swillden asks: "I need to package up some commercial Linux software for multiple distributions (Red Hat Enterprise 3 and 4, Fedora, Novell Desktop, SuSE Professional and Enterprise, Mandrake and Debian), and I'm wondering what tools others have found useful. The software is closed source and needs to be very easy to install. This has been an ongoing problem for commercial software on Linux for some time. Has there been any progress?" "So far, the options I'm looking into are:

1. Create distribution-specific packages using each distribution's tools. Nice in lots of ways, but a lot of work for ~11 different distributions.
2. Use a commercial cross-distro installer like InstallShield. This is what the previous developers chose.
3. Use one of the open source cross-distro installers, like autopackage or Loki.
4. Write a custom installer.

I really would like to provide distro-specific packages, to make use of the native dependency management solutions and to make the software fit nicely into each system, but implementing, testing and supporting all of those installers may be too costly. It may also exclude any other Linux distributions unnecessarily.

I don't like the current InstallShield installer for multiple reasons. First, it's written in Java which is fine except that it can only run if a JRE is present. Requiring users to install a JRE so they can run the installer to install a (non-Java) product is really annoying. Also, it doesn't really know how to do any proper dependency management, so the developers had to take the approach of installing everything that might be required, often duplicating tools that might already be on the system, and sometimes even creating conflicts. Obviously this approach doesn't integrate with the native package management at all.

The Loki installer has some of the same limitations as InstallShield, but it doesn't require Java and it's very scriptable, so I could probably write code to do the dependency checking and be smarter about what to install.

Autopackage looks very interesting, and I'm going to take all of the docs with me to read on a flight this afternoon. However, I'm concerned that it may be unstable, as it's just reached a 1.0 release.

Finally, I could always just write an installer from scratch, but that may be even more work than creating all the distro-specific packages."

Comments

Fairly simple...

[wolf31o2]

Well, even though you made it sound almost impossible, all of those distributions except for one use RPM. It really is quite easy to build a RPM file that will work on all of those distributions. You then have to support two things, RPM and DPKG. A properly-written RPM spec file will work on any of those distributions. The hardest part is figuring out the dependencies and specifying them in the spec file, which not limiting anything to specific versions, other than where absolutely necessary.

Having worked with both RPM and ebuilds, I tend to prefer the Loki Setup method for distributing cross-distribution packages. It works on every distribution, and tends to be fairly easy to work with in general. While your package won't be tracked by the distribution's own package menagement, you're talking about creating a commercial software package. It should probably be installing into /opt/$packagename anyway and be fairly self-contained. This seems to work well for commercial software.