Distributing a program in linux without the source

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1068530

Question

I want to be able to distribute a program in Linux without distributing the source with it. The current solution is distributing a tar.gz with a precompiled binary. What is the easiest way to have this binary be placed in the Applications Menu? Is there a way to do this that is common across most linux distributions, but Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSUSE would be the priority.

Was it helpful?

Solution

You will want to create a .deb and a .rpm. The former covers Ubuntu (Debian variants), and the latter Red Hat variants. You can also supply a standalone executable for other users who can deal with things like menus themselves.

You will have to deal with Gnome and KDE menu management, and also different distributions lay out their menus differently. There is also the issue of netbook variants such as Moblin, that have a netbook interface that probably has its own "add application" mechanism. I don't know if it is possible for a single .deb to handle both Gnome and KDE menus systems (for Ubuntu and Kubuntu respectively) but I imagine the capability is there to reduce duplication of effort for Ubuntu.

OTHER TIPS

All recent distributions should have xdg-utils installed, which provides scripts such as

  • xdg-desktop-icon
  • xdg-desktop-menu

which seem to be what you're looking for.

Haven't looked into it lately...but back in the day (which really wasn't all that long ago) when I was using Linux, RPM was the easiest way to distribute pre-combiled binaries (most distributations had, and still have, some kind of support for RPM packages).

Here's an old how-to on building an RPM package:

Linux Online - RPM How-To

You could look at BitRock intaller.

Try Autopackage or other solutions posted in another question.

Do tar.gz and then give community rights to redistribute modified packages. They will make RPMs, DEBs and any other packages for their beloved distributions... which will probably fit their distros much better than you could ever make.

There is really too many differences between distributions to make one-size-fits-all package, often subtle ones. For example some distributions has "Application" section, other "Applications"... and this made menu items disappear on some distros. Libraries can be different, default settings can be different, and so on...

RPMs and DEBs aren't so portable as it is believed. With one package there might be problems even with different versions of a single distribution, and there is nothing worse than fighting to install badly prepared package correctly.

JeeBee is correct that you would want to go with .deb or .rpm.

For Ubuntu/Debian (the .deb) I would add that you do not send it to people but you create a "repository" and have the users add that url to their /etc/apt/sources.list, then you get a easy way to update the software as well.

That way you solve the distribution and updated problem at the same time.

And here is a example of how this could look like:

And how a repository could look like:

But don't repeat Atmels mistake and only do i386 because there is a lot of other common architectures out there right now, like the amd64.

/Johan

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