On 01/29/2012 02:38 PM, Dan Kegel wrote: > Hi Scott, > I agree with what Vrit said. > > Here's what I recall learning from helping package Picasa: > - don't package the installer
Right, run the installer and use the contents of the result as the packaged files. > - rely on the system's update manager to pull updated versions of the > package from the repository This may not be a fast-enough option for some apps, such as online games that need to keep everyone in version sync. Even in an ideal case where the company was 100% behind the Ubuntu package and kept it in sync with their release process, there is still no current way for the Windows app to tell Apt to update its package. > - install everything read-only into /opt/companyname/appname > - start the app using a shell script that creates a wineprefix on 1st run > - The wineprefix should have real directories (so the app can create > files in Program Files, ugh), should symlink to all the readonly files > in /opt, and have real copies of any files that can't be read-only > As Vrit said, the script that creates the wineprefix is very > app-specific, but once you write one, it's probably easy to write the > next one. Perhaps I'm speaking from inexperience with either, but wouldn't a unionfs-fuse overlay be simpler and cleaner than this since you wouldn't have to worry about the app-specific stuff at all? > - If you are running your own repo, you should put exactly one app per > repo. Otherwise you run into trouble because Canonical would want to > review all the apps in the repo every time you update any one of them. > This is already how apps work in the App Store - commercial apps get their own repos, if they require payment then it's a private launchpad PPA, and the user gets a unique access key when they buy it. > So no overlay filesystem needed, symlinks should usually suffice. > > (Picasa also went further and bundled a snapshot of wine, too, and > modified the app slightly to display unix paths, which required adding > one little extension to wine. I'm sure the wine patch is around if > someone wants it. And since it was in a non-ubuntu repo, it had to do > a strange song and dance to avoid autoupdates being disabled when the > user upgraded to a new version of ubuntu. This was considered safe > because picasa was fairly well self-contained and maintained, and was > unlikely to break on system updates.) This patch would be interesting if you could dig it up. I don't know if Alexandre would accept it, but ideally it would be part of Wine and turned on via an environment variable or command line switch. > > In case you want to look at picasa's scripts, the download page seems > to be gone, but the repo seems to still be there: > > http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/pool/non-free/p/picasa/picasa_3.0-current_i386.deb > http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/pool/non-free/p/picasa/picasa_3.0-current_amd64.deb > 4ecf30186ce76430a7791cee2608f47e07b015e6 picasa_3.0-current_amd64.deb > fe8e83b29a10b5d663e87861d85512faea036c06 picasa_3.0-current_i386.deb > > Still installs and runs ok on 11.10. Thanks! Thanks, Scott Ritchie
