[Lazarus] cross-distro (and OS) app installation - what would you like?

[Vladimir Zhirov]

Graeme Geldenhuys <graemeg.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Anyway, I would like to know what features your guys (as developers)
> would like to see in a setup program.

I can think of the one additional feature:

* Checking dependencies. There is no such problem in fpGUI apps
since the only dependency is X :) But Lazarus apps can be stuck to
specific GTK/QT version(s). I can remember posts about the GTK API
change that made some Lazarus applications crash. Then, there is a
plenty of other external libraries our applications can use.
I can imagine this as a "missing dependencies" message that is shown
if some required library was not found. This seems to be quite
difficult though, given the requirement of Linux distro independency...

> * Automatic icon creation on desktop and Application/Start menu.
And this seems not so easy too..

Paul Ishenin <ip at kmiac.ru> wrote:
> My wish list - port innosetup (http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php) 
> which is written in delphi and is opensource project. We are using it 
> for lazarus windows installs.

This could help very much in the adoption of new install system. Though
I think old school Linux users would hate it anyway (according to my
observations), it would be good for newcomers if the setup
configuration files/scripts look like one of the exisiting
install system, such as InnoSetup/NSIS/whatever. In this case
InnoSetup has the advantage of PascalScript, that makes it easier
to port. So the above suggesion can form one more feature request:

* Familiar syntax of configuration files/scripts.

-- 
Best regards,
Vladimir Zhirov