Hi everybody, First I want to bring you up to date on the status of BitRock. It has been over 5 years now and the installer has certainly improved. To address your concerns:
> no deb/rpm (or other native package management system) integration We support integration with the native package manager, > no (or bad) 64bit support, We provide native 64bit installers if you need them > autopackage has some great tools for building all our binaries with ABI > stable versions of gcc so it works with everyone. We do not offer such tools, we concentrate on just the packaging side of things. Having said that, we have developed quite a bit of expertise in packaging software so it runs across as many different distribution versions as possible, we may be able to help here > the installbuilder was very immature and quite difficult to work with (no > recursive add of a directory for example) The GUI has never been a strong point of the installer. Though we have improved it quite a bit, people prefer to use the XML file directly using Emacs Once the user installs the app, it can easily remove it running the uninstaller > I guess that we could build the autopackage binary, install it and create > the bitrock installer using the binaries from the autopackage install... That is certainly an option. One thing that I would strongly suggest that you consider is bundling a Tcl/Tk interpreter with aMSN as well as many other dependencies as possible. The increase in download size will pay itself many times over with reduced support costs. Think of a ".app" in OS X, it just works for most people most of the time... If other people want integration with underlying operating system or other versions of libraries they can always use the native distribution packages or compile from source. Also, I wanted to clarify that although we come from an open source background, Installbuilder itself is not open source. We give free licenses to open source projects such as aMSN. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLCompatInstaller In this case we could give a try to create both the binaries for aMSN and the installers, just wanted to check beforehand that there is interest (as we will spend a substantial amount of time on this) Best regards 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Register Now & Save for Velocity, the Web Performance & Operations Conference from O'Reilly Media. Velocity features a full day of expert-led, hands-on workshops and two days of sessions from industry leaders in dedicated Performance & Operations tracks. Use code vel09scf and Save an extra 15% before 5/3. http://p.sf.net/sfu/velocityconf _______________________________________________ Amsn-devel mailing list Amsn-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/amsn-devel
