Hi Daniel!
How funny, when I saw your email this morning, I thought "what a
coincidence, I was just thinking of bitrock yesterday night"... but it looks
like google alerts was behind this! I didn't know about google alerts, it
looks like a nice google feature! :)
Anyways, yes there is interest. I was actually just thinking that we might
have a second look at bitrock now. We liked bitrock a lot at the time, but
it had its limitations so we switched to autopackage. Now might be a good
time to switch back to bitrock, or as you suggested, provide both binaries!
Well, we'd have to discuss this with the other memebers of the team, since I
can't exactly remember what was missing from the bitrock installer that made
us use autopackage, but if I'm not wrong, the few issues I can remember are
:
- no deb/rpm (or other native package management system) integration
- no (or bad) 64bit support,
- autopackage has some great tools for building all our binaries with ABI
stable versions of gcc so it works with everyone.
- the installbuilder was very immature and quite difficult to work with (no
recursive add of a directory for example)
I just took a quick look to your features list and it looks like you have
rpm integration but no deb integration, but it also says that it has .deb
generation! So I'm not too sure, I don't know much about all this, so maybe
if you can provide us with more info, it might help! Does it just generate a
.deb for us, or does it generate/install the .deb out of the installer in
order to install on the user's systems? in other words, do we provide a
single binary which will install a .deb/rpm on user's systems, or we'd have
to provide a .deb, a .rpm and the bitrock installer?
Also, there seems to be some differences between distributions, so is it
even possible to have a single .deb file that would work on debian, ubuntu
hardy/intrepid/gutsy/etc... same would apply for the .rpm (would it work for
mandrake, mandriva, redhat, fedora core, etc...) ?
About the 64 bits support, we realized that autopackage seems to have a few
problems unfortunately, so if you can provide a good 64 bit support, we'd be
glad!
Concerning the tools autopackage provides, you may want to have a look at
them : http://autopackage.org/aptools.html especially apgcc, I know there
are some other tools we use, but Philippe Valembois would know better than
me.Basically it compiles the whole thing with some very old version of gcc
that is ABI stable so it will work for people with old and newer versions of
the libc, it also does some magic stuff for us...
I guess that we could build the autopackage binary, install it and create
the bitrock installer using the binaries from the autopackage install...
I can already assume that the installbuilder has come a long way since then
and that all the small issues we had with it are already fixed or less
annoying than before.
Once a user installs the app, does he have an easy way to uninstall it?
Assuming you don't have system integration, then is it like an uninstall
application that they can launch, or is there some kind of package
managmeent system like autopackage does?
I'm CC-ing the amsn-devel mailing list, this way others can see this, and we
can get a more informed answer about the subject!
p.s.: Just an FYI, In this screenshot :
http://installbuilder.bitrock.com/right-to-left-screenshot.html The title
bar doesn't seem to support RTL correctly, so if that's fixed, maybe you
should regenerate the screenshot.
@amsn-devel subscribers: please use reply all for Daniel to see our
responses, thanks.
Thanks!
Youness.
On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 1:49 PM, Daniel Lopez <dan...@bitrock.com> wrote:
> Hi Youness,
>
> I just saw your post on this via Google Alerts. If there is interest,
> we can take a look at packaging aMSN together with all the
> dependencies.
>
> http://www.amsn-project.net/forums/viewtopic.php?p=38159
>
> We already do something like that for BitNami stacks
> (http://bitnami.org) and InstallBuilder has come a long way from our
> beginnings :) Just let us know if this is something you would be
> interested in (maybe initially distributing alongside .package, to see
> which one people like the most) and we can work on it
>
> Best regards
>
> Daniel
>
> --
> Daniel Lopez, CTO. http://bitrock.com
> Confidential - All Rights Reserved. BitRock © 2009
>
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