[MonoDevelop] Deployment

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Sun, 19 Apr 2009, ubunturocks wrote:
> Hi,
> I just completed a simple game in MonoDevelop (C#), using SDL.Net.
> Currently, the source code is sitting inside MonoDevelop and I have no idea
> how to "deploy" it. In Windows, I'd use a setup program called Inno Setup.
> Sometimes I see .deb files on Ubuntu that seem to work as installers. I want
> to have something like  .DEB files, while trying to support Mac, and as many
> as Linux distros as possible. I know .deb files only support Debian, and
> Ubuntu distros.

There are a few ways to deploy applications for various systems.  You can use 
an installer such as IzPack, though then you will depend on there being a JVM 
present, as well as a CLR.

I don't know of a CLR version of such a thing, but I am sure that it'd be 
entirely possible to write one.

You can also support "native" installations, such as .deb or .rpm on Linux.  I 
don't know what the installation/uninstallation convention on OS X is, but it 
probably is an OS X specific API, like the Microsoft Installer is for Windows.

You can also just provide a .zip file that users extract and then run, doing 
no installation whatsoever.  If you're open source, provide .zip files of both 
the source and the binary, and people will package it for their native systems 
as they find it.

> Also, do users need to have Mono installed to use the application? And for
> the users to use the application (specifically SDL.NET), I only have to
> include the 2 .DLL files for C#?

Yes, your users will need Mono installed.  If you use SDL.NET, they will also 
need native SDL libraries installed so that those wrappers have something to 
call (unless the SDL.NET libraries do not P/Invoke the SDL libs and are 
themselves another implementation of SDL, but I doubt that very much; they are 
probably just wrappers).

 	--- Mike