On 2013-03-02 7:02 AM, Graham Leggett wrote:
On 02 Mar 2013, at 5:40 AM, Eric Kolotyluk <[email protected]> wrote:
I have been toying with the idea for a while as a software developer who has
had to build installers for applications and services, and I am often
dissatisfied with the experience I get using other people's installers. At one
time I was playing with the idea of my own installer that would be cross
platform, but the initial bootstrap would be platform dependent, and install
enough platform independent stuff, to do the rest in a standard way.
Modern OSes come with installation systems out the box, and operations people
already understand those existing systems, there needs to be a very compelling
reason to deploy some software using the platform's own deployment mechanism,
and other software via a different system.
I wish this were so, but I can easily think of a half a dozen different
ways software gets installed or deployed on Windows. Some people use
.msi files, other people use InstallAnywhere, and there are all kinds of
different mechanisms.
The deployment systems that are the most painful are those systems that target
a specific language. You can't just get operations to install the software, you
have to suddenly turn your operations people into language programmers to
figure things out when a deployment goes wrong.
Agreed. Operations people should not have to be software developers,
just specialized computer users.
Ideally I'd like to see maven make it easy to create OS specific installers to
offer the best experience for each OS, rather than come up with a competing
system.
That is my fantasy too.
Regards,
Graham
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