Re: Distributing projects.
On Sun, 17 Jan 2010, Arne Vajh?j wrote:
On 17-01-2010 13:42, Daniel Pitts wrote:
I have a project that I've been working on, and its nearly ready for
beta distribution. It's on sourceforge if that makes any difference.
The program itself can be distributed as a single executable jar file,
but there are other files that should be included. For one thing, at
least some "getting started" documentation. For another thing, sample
files for use within the program. The samples should be part of the
default installation, because they will be useful to most people.
So, what are some common ways of handling this? I could build a couple
of distributions (.zip, .tgz, .tar.bz2), and let people install them
manually, but I'd rather make it as easy as possible.
If the expected audience are developers then I would definitely
say just ZIP format. Very flexible and non-intrusive.
+1, with the emphasis on non-intrusive. I would *much* rather have a zip
than an installer. I know what a zip's going to do when i open it, and i
get a chance to look at the contents before i do anything with them, and
then what i do is my decision. Installers take that autonomy away from me.
I'm even annoyed with RPMs because of this - i installed OpenJDK from an
RPM to play with the other day, and it made itself my default java. Not
what i wanted, and something that caused me some significant debugging
pain.
tom
--
Heinlein has done more to harm SF than has any other writer, I think. --
PKD