how to create a self extracting tarball?

[Christopher Browne]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 12:58 PM, bob 295 <icanprogram-sKcZck+fQKg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

I'd generally rather that this not be done altogether.

What I'd *rather* do is to have the specs available (perhaps living in
the same source code repository) for Debian dpkg packages (which tend
to also be usable on Debian derivatives like Ubuntu) and RPM "spec"
files (which tend to be usable with Fedora, RH(AS|ES), SuSE and such).

If you pre-define an installation mechanism, by default, that will
make life more difficult for people using pre-existing systems like
dpkg and rpm.

The *next* step, after having "spec files" for these packaging
systems, would be that users of such systems could automatically use
their dependancy managers to draw in the SIMPL codebase, using a
declarative system.

Thus, for a Debian/Ubuntu user, the installation steps would be:
 - make sure a suitable source is listed in /etc/apt/sources.list
 - run "apt-get install simpl"

For RPM-based systems, the details are different but analagous.

The benefit to it being "declarative" is that it then makes it easy to
make SIMPL a dependancy.  If someone writes an application that uses
it, they don't need to explain how to install it, they merely indicate
the dependancy in their app.

Thus, if I install app-that-uses-simpl, I don't even need to say
anything about SIMPL.  I just run:

# apt-get install app-that-uses-simpl

If I don't already have SIMPL installed, Debian/Ubuntu will go off and
grab it for me.  If I *do*, then there's nothing to be done.

There are generally two possibilities:

a) If SIMPL becomes popular enough that people build spec files and
get it into the common package repositories, then the mechanisms that
you're worrying about are totally irrelevant.  Someone (perhaps the
proverbial "someone else") will deal with making it *trivial* to
install, as a mostly-invisible side-effect of installing something
that uses SIMPL.

b) If SIMPL isn't that popular, then a system administrator faced with
using it will be faced with grabbing a tarball and installing it.
Seeing as how that's The Standard Way that everything else that needs
manual installing gets installed, the tarball offers the Least
Surprise.

The best answer, it seems to me, is to try to trend towards making
option b) as easy as possible.

That's what everyone else does, for pretty large lists of "everyone."

- *ALL* FSF projects are distributed... as tarballs.
- Linux is distributed... as a tarball.  (Linux is an OS kernel, you know :-).)
- Ditto for X.org, GNOME, KDE, PostgreSQL, MySQL(tm), OpenOffice.org, Apache.

The only sorts of things that I see that distribute as self-extracting
scripts are proprietary applications.

Generally speaking, by making it easy to get at a tarball, THAT makes
it easy to build packages that can get automagically included, which
means that administrators don't have to execute *anything*.
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