Distributions / Package Managers Thoughts
Posted: Fri Sep 27, 2013 5:16 pm
One of the challenges with Linux is how do you distribute your application? Right now there are three pretty popular formats for packaging: RPM, DEB, and TGZ. In the future Steam, especially in light of SteamOS might become another popular method of distribution. Personally I'd like to see at least DEB and TGZ supported, as DEB is going to be the most convenient package for most desktop distributions since Debian and subsequently Ubuntu variants seem to have the most market share here. As long as the DEB package doesn't have any dependencies, or minimal ones it should be compatible across a wide set of Linux distributions. Providing a TGZ archive is a good option because it will work everywhere, it's just less convenient because it won't utilize the systems package manager for installation, updates, uninstall, etc... Along those lines having a APT repository setup to download the application from would be fantastic since then you could fully utilize the package manager for things like pushing out updates. I think one more thing that makes DEB/APT look like the best option is SteamOS being based on Ubuntu will support it.
So DEB/APT to make things easy for the majority of users, and TGZ for everybody else would be my recommendation.
So DEB/APT to make things easy for the majority of users, and TGZ for everybody else would be my recommendation.