Distributing applications
Archives Forums/Linux Discussion/Distributing applications
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Ok, I just went through apt-get hell getting BMax working on my Xubuntu box. But it's working... What files do I need to package up (along with my executable) when it comes to distributing my game to other linux users? |
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Technically, nothing. Everything is supposed to be installed already unless you have any custom libs. |
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As markcw says nothing. But it is always helpful to list your programs dependencies. You can use the ldd command to find out what these are but as there are so many flavors of linux, it's hard to say what library belongs to what package. |
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A tarball is enough. But you could also create a debian package, or rpm file. |
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Yep. deb packages work well, since they specify other requirements, although they are a pain to configure... (that's an understatement) |
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Shouldn't the program include some kind of configure script which checks whether the required libs are installed? |
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The packages are meant to take care of that for you. It's basically the whole point of packages and package managers. |
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Yes I know, but different distributions have different package managers. I for one won't install a package manager which can handle .deb for example, so I need those configure scripts. |
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Yes I know, but different distributions have different package managers. Which is one of the many big problems with Linux. Too much choice actually harms the platform instead of promoting it. In BSD land, these things are much easier because they are consolidated. But the Linux crowd just loves to re-invent the wheel. |
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Which is one of the many big problems with Linux. Nope, software should be free, and then it's up to distribution developers to manage the packages. |