On 2020-01-05 1:51 p.m., Patrick Spek via perl6-users wrote:
On Sat, 4 Jan 2020 22:23:30 -0800 Darren Duncan wrote:
Last I recall, there was no Mac installer for Rakudo Star at all, nor
was there any need for one. The compiled project is simply in a zip
file which the end-uaer unzips and then the resulting folder is ready
to use as is. Don't know about Windows. If anything, on the Mac,
having an installer has always been a misfeature, and most
applications don't have one. -- Darren Duncan
Looking at the archives on rakudo.org[1], there are .dmg files, which
are packages for Mac I believe. Though, I'm not using a Mac, so please
tell me if these are just Mac specific archives to be unzipped.
As yary said, a .dmg file is just a disk image, like a .iso, and for all intents
and purposes is the same as a zip file. A key benefit of a .dmg is that you can
inspect its contents without having to decompress everything so it remains a
single compressed file to the main filesystem. So a .dmg is NOT an installer.
One can optionally contain an installer, but it can also and typically does just
contain the application itself, and you just drag and drop to copy it to the
location you want to use it in like copying from one disk to another. Both .dmg
and .zip files will simply open in the MacOS Finder, no special software needed.
The tarball I've created requires compilation in addition to just
"unzipping", though. I'm not sure if that's a problem for regular Mac
users. If it's not, I guess the Mac part is not an obstacle for getting
a release out.
[1]: https://rakudo.org/files/star
The normal Rakudo Star releases so far are compiled, so all an end user needs to
do is double-click the disk image and drag-copy the folder to their filesystem.
That, and also add its "bin" subfolder to their path.
If your version requires users to run a Makefile or make or cc or whatever or
have a working C compiler, then it is a source release and not the same thing.
The MacOS does NOT have a C compiler installed out of the box, although they
make it very easy to install one on demand. In the MacOS Terminal if one simply
tries to invoke "make" or "gcc" or whatever, they will get a fake executable
that offers to install Apple's MacOS Developer Tools (or alternately XCode, but
I recommend you don't if you're just doing basic portable Unix stuff), and then
a minute or two later you have your C compiler etc, which will then
automatically be kept up to date by Apple's Software Update in the same way the
MacOS itself is.
You probably don't want to do that though, users expect the pre-compiled
binaries.
-- Darren Duncan
