It’s been a long day and I’m probably not in the best state of mind to be asking this question, but have you guys solved packaging yet?

I want to ship an executable with supporting files in a compressed archive, much like the Windows exe-in-a-zip pattern. I can cross-compile a Win32 C program using MinGW that will always use baseline Win32 functionality, but if I try to build for Linux I run into the whole dependency versioning situation, specifically glibc fixing its symbol version to whichever Linux I happen to be building from at the time. But if I try to static link with musl, the expectation is that everything is static linked, including system libraries that really shouldn’t be.

AppImage is in the ballpark of what I’m looking for, and I’ve heard that Zig works as a compatibility-enhancing frontend if you’re compiling C. I’d just like something simple that runs 99% of the time for non-technical end users and isn’t bloated with dependencies I can’t keep track of. (No containers.) Is this easily achievable?

  • edinbruh@feddit.it
    0·
    6 months ago

    I think you are confusing “windows like” with “user-friendly”. A “bespoke archive, that you find on some developer’s website, that you extract and somewhere it contains an executable and assets, that you move where you want to keep them” is not how you usually do stuff on Linux and is not even user-friendly.

    Distributions come with programs like “gnome software” or “kde discover” that allows the user to graphically install programs from the distro’s package manager, or from flatpak or snap. It will also help them to keep them updated and to manage dependencies. That is user-friendly.

    I suggest using flatpak. It will work on almost all distros out of the box and will be easy to install and maintain for the user. If flatpak is too “bloated” for you because it uses containers, then you need to package it for every distro manually, but that’s a log of work. If it’s something that just needs to be used once and never again, consider an appimage or a script.

    Distros are different operating systems, it’s not gonna be easy to package for all of them without compromises.