How to Distribute Binaries for OS X Using Homebrew • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Distribute Binaries for OS X Using Homebrew

#81

Post by zwetan » Tue, Feb 16, 2016, 11:31 AM UTC

>Cross-platform app distribution is a hard problem!

indeed, but couple of things

specific to Mac OS X: there are homebrew, macports, fink and probably more

distributing with homebrew to someone who already going with macports is problematic for example as it is advised to not have both installed.

One alternative is to distribute a pkg and so use PackageMaker to build one.

A pkg has the pros to be native to Apple, but the cons to not work for other systems like Windows and Linux.

So here another alternative: Debian packages (deb).

Wether with macports, homebrew or fink you can install the command line utility dpkg, and using dpkg-deb you can build deb supporting the darwin-amd64 arch.

For Windows, you can use the utility wpkg, http://windowspackager.org/ and with it you can build deb packages for win32 and win64 architectures.

Ultimately if you distribute command-line tools (not GUI app), you can use deb packages for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux Debian (Ubuntu etc.)

Here an example (one of my tools that I need to distrib/install on servers): https://github.com/Corsaair/as3shebang/releases/tag/1.0.0

Debian packages for everyone :)

Linux and Mac OS X install: dpkg -i as3shebang_1.0.0_amd64.deb

Windows install: wpkg -i as3shebang_1.0.0_win64.deb

You can see the build scripts at the root of the repo, they are pretty similar.

Also, once you have deb packages you can also convert them to rpm and other nix-like packages usinga tool like alien, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(software).

Re: How to Distribute Binaries for OS X Using Homebrew

#82

Post by m_mueller » Tue, Feb 16, 2016, 2:06 PM UTC

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #80

m_mueller wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every OS ... except Windows?

Windows Store?

From a user's perspective maybe (although I find the usefulness of that thing highly questionable on a current Windows 10 computer, it doesn't even have a touch friendly official youtube app last time I checked). But from a dev's perspective, i.e. getting the tools to develop something? Nah, not even close.

Re: How to Distribute Binaries for OS X Using Homebrew

#83

Post by m_mueller » Tue, Feb 16, 2016, 2:12 PM UTC

provemewrong wrote: post #72

m_mueller wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every OS ... except Windows?

Didn't Windows 10 get PackageManagement FKA OneGet? I mean I haven't upgraded because of privacy, but at least it exists.

Interesting, TIL. I wonder how complete it is. E.g. how much work until you have python and pip? gcc? An SMTP Server? A web server?

Re: How to Distribute Binaries for OS X Using Homebrew

#84

Post by OJFord » Tue, Feb 16, 2016, 3:21 PM UTC

JonathonW wrote: post #69

OJFord wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the core WTF is this: why doesn't OSX integrate a > package manager for its unixy side? They could, but my guess would be that they don't want friendly-looking tutorials (i.e. ones that the average user wouldn't be scared to follow) saying: > Ah, you just need to update your packages; install foo: > macman -Syu && macman -S foo They don't want to 'have to' offer support for average users accidentally doing 'power u…

Except there are lots of other "power user" things that are built in. Where do you draw the line? It's more likely that they just consider package management out of scope for their part of development-- something that benefits too few people to be worth the cost. Seems to have paid off, too-- package management has been well-handled on OSX for a long time, both through semi-sanctioned projects like MacPorts (which is…

    > there are lots of other "power user" things that are
    > built in

Can you think of any that were they not there, they would still implement today?

I thought someone might bring up AppleScript - but I think that's a relic of every user being a 'power user', and personally I really doubt it'd be created today if it didn't already exist; it probably doesn't take much to keep it around now that it is.