[Lazarus] Installer recommendations

[Henry Vermaak]

On 1 August 2011 10:24, Mark Morgan Lloyd
<markMLl.lazarus at telemetry.co.uk> wrote:
>
> I wonder if I could phrase the OP's question in a slightly different way.
>
> Allowing that Linux and other unix-style OSes have package formats of
> various kinds, and allowing that an MSI file is just another implementation
> of the same sort of thing, is there a "meta installer" that can at the very
> least be used to build dependency lists etc.?

I guess so, but as you say, it probably would only be a skeleton.
Which I think is fine.  Things like driver installs are totally
different, even between linux distros.  There are installers that
bypass the os specific installing mechanisms (e.g. just copy files).
I think this is a supremely bad idea.  The various package managers
have saved me lots of hassle over the years.

> Debian and derivatives have a utility called  alien  that can be used to
> convert between package formats, but it seems to me to be unfortunate if a
> programmer has to go through a sequence of stages to build a package for
> Debian, another for Ubuntu which might have different locations or symlinks
> for e.g. database libraries, another for Fedora and then finally something
> similar for Windows.

I agree, it's a massive pain.  Perhaps someone will come up with some
clever specification that everyone will adhere to.  Most likely not.

Henry