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

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 20/01/2010, Vincent Snijders <vsnijders at vodafonevast.nl> wrote:
>
>  To bad, the ideal setup creator would get a setup.xml and compile it to
> .rpm, .deb, windows installer, .dmg with Mac OS X package, etc.
>
>  Kind of like the Lazarus idea, one source for many OS/widget set
> combinations.

Good point, but I see a few problems.

1) Using the various packaging formats, those packages would have to
be built on dedicated platforms. With the custom install and our
supported platforms, I will be able to build setups from inside my one
Linux system, using native FPC or a FPC cross-compiler.

2) The other point might be that now you have to learn all the various
package management systems out there so you can build the various
packages. That will be a huge task (I think).

3) Using the package systems like dpkg or rpm, you cannot do the following:
   * show a company logo or other branding
   * view a readme file before the install
   * select certain features to install (with help on each feature)
   * have a one file install (a feature we would love on Linux)
   * have other customization options during the install. Not easily
     at least. I have seen a handful of .deb packages that prompt for
     a Yes/No question, but that's about it. Most prompted in a console
     window (ugly) and one or two prompted in a GTK2 dialog (no idea how).


Either way, you raised an interesting idea. Maybe an option for some
other Lazarus user to implement. :-)


>  But from the maintainer of fpgui which doesn't use an existing...
<...snip...>

That's not nice. :-(
BTW: There is another GUI toolkit which does exactly what I am doing
with fpGUI, and it is called FOX Toolkit [http://www.fox-toolkit.org]
and is implemented in C++. Ever heard of them? They are quite popular,
have been around for many years, commercial companies love them, they
have a huge user base, little dependencies, lightning fast
executables, etc.

So fpGUI isn't that much off the mark by not following the GTK2, Qt
etc route. :) I program to fulfill a need and make my life easier in
the end. Currently LCL doesn't fulfill my needs, but luckily Lazarus
IDE does. ;-)


-- 
Regards,
  - Graeme -


_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/