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Releases – a workflow for shipping software to end users

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Re: Releases – a workflow for shipping software to end users

#31
post #29

I just had a glimpse of a wonderful future where GitHub releases a payments system, packaging options, and suddenly becomes an ideal app store ecosystem.

With their recent $100mm round, they might be working on this already. Could lead to an interesting future of software selling/piracy, where those that will buy, buy, and those that are desperate not to can

  git clone
  make clean; make install

Re: Releases – a workflow for shipping software to end users

#33
post #29

I just had a glimpse of a wonderful future where GitHub releases a payments system, packaging options, and suddenly becomes an ideal app store ecosystem.

With their recent $100mm round, they might be working on this already. Could lead to an interesting future of software selling/piracy, where those that will buy, buy, and those that are desperate not to can git clone make clean; make install

I've already seen a number of apps in the Mac App Store that take this exact approach.

Two examples off the top of my head:

Textual, an IRC client [1, 2]

Blink, a SIP client [3, 4]...this is pretty difficult to compile, though...

-----

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/textual/id403012667

[2] https://github.com/Codeux/Textual

[3] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blink-lite/id431473881

[4] http://icanblink.com/download.phtml

Re: Releases – a workflow for shipping software to end users

#34
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jenkins or any other of the continuous integration solutions

Yes, but that normally involves lots of inline-shell-scripting and connecting a wide array of plugins together. It's not exactly a stream-lined process.

Maybe something like ansible even would make that easier.

Re: Releases – a workflow for shipping software to end users

#35
post #6

I was a vocal critic when GitHub discontinued their downloads product earlier this year. I work on open source projects with compiled binaries. GitHub's answer to distribution had been "Use S3" which I never found satisfactory. As soon as they release an API, I'll be migrating all my projects over. EDIT: Just added my first release. Super easy. https://github.com/hawkthorne/tmx2lua/releases

Which makes me wonder, since that wasn't all that long ago, why did they not give a teaser? Or did they, and we all missed it?

Discontinuing the downloads was a big deal to a lot of people, which generated a non-trivial amount of bad press, but if they'd simply said "we have something better in the works" then I don't think anyone would've cared. Surely this wasn't dreamt up in between then and now...?

Re: Releases – a workflow for shipping software to end users

#36
post #35
post #6

I was a vocal critic when GitHub discontinued their downloads product earlier this year. I work on open source projects with compiled binaries. GitHub's answer to distribution had been "Use S3" which I never found satisfactory. As soon as they release an API, I'll be migrating all my projects over. EDIT: Just added my first release. Super easy. https://github.com/hawkthorne/tmx2lua/releases

Which makes me wonder, since that wasn't all that long ago, why did they not give a teaser? Or did they, and we all missed it? Discontinuing the downloads was a big deal to a lot of people, which generated a non-trivial amount of bad press, but if they'd simply said "we have something better in the works" then I don't think anyone would've cared. Surely this wasn't dreamt up in between then and now...?

Still, why would you get rid of it in the first place just because something is better on the way? IIRC their reasons for getting rid of it had to do with not being a distribution center and focusing strictly on the source code development. It probably wasn't just "dreamt up" but more likely they found new reasons why it should complement their future business model.

Re: Releases – a workflow for shipping software to end users

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With their recent $100mm round, they might be working on this already. Could lead to an interesting future of software selling/piracy, where those that will buy, buy, and those that are desperate not to can git clone make clean; make install

I've already seen a number of apps in the Mac App Store that take this exact approach. Two examples off the top of my head: Textual, an IRC client [1, 2] Blink, a SIP client [3, 4]...this is pretty difficult to compile, though... ----- [1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/textual/id403012667 [2] https://github.com/Codeux/Textual [3] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blink-lite/id431473881 [4] http://icanblink.com/downlo…

I wish I could pay for Blink on Windows, because it's my main SIP client. Windows definitely doesn't get the attention that Mac OS does, but the client is the best one I've found. (I really grew to hate Bria/X-Lite.)

Re: Releases – a workflow for shipping software to end users

#40
post #29

I just had a glimpse of a wonderful future where GitHub releases a payments system, packaging options, and suddenly becomes an ideal app store ecosystem.

I blogged a bit about this, with discovery and an app store type area with 3rd party apps like my site could be of use and extend features beyond what GitHub wants to support. If you want to read about my ideas: http://derekmyers.com/posts/open-source-information-overload...
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