On 12/04/2012 12:59 AM, Terry Welsh wrote:
I love developing on Linux, but windowing and packaging seem to be big issues. I supposed it's because of the scattered nature of Linux (many distros with many desktop managers, and packaging systems).
Actually, the way to go is to prepare something that can be distributed and then work with the packagers of the distros instead of trying to supply your own "installer". They will handle the packaging, integration with various desktop environments within their distro and even distribution for you.
The ideal case is when your application is open source - then make sure that the build system is sane (i.e. something similar to the ./configure && ./make && make install) and you should be set.
If you application is not open source, then it is tad more complex. If you are still allowing free redistribution, then the above still applies, but you need to prepare something that is easy to install and actually runs on the target distro - e.g. a statically linked file in a tar.gz file, with all the required data. Make sure to not hardwire any paths, because different distros put things in different places and without source code they couldn't patch your application to integrate well. For example, Adobe Acrobat Reader is/used to be commonly distributed in this way.
If you application is purely closed source and not allowing free redistribution, then you are on your own. However, a binary either packaged with all its dependencies or statically linked and stored in a tar.gz file will run on any modern distribution. Targeting recent Fedora or Ubuntu is a safe bet that will probably cover some 80% of the user base, because those distributions are popular and many others are based on them or using same software versions.
Don't bother with the various window manager integration - you will always get it wrong for someone (e.g. Mageia has different KDE/Gnome menus than Fedora which has them yet different than SuSE ...). The users are smart enough to make a shortcut in the menu themselves if that is what they want and when you are working with the distro packagers directly, they will take care of it anyway.
There is also this, more technical article from 2005, but it applies the same today as it did back then:
http://onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/03/31/packaging.html Regards, Jan _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
