[MonoDevelop] Deployment for desktop applications

[Michael Hutchinson]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 1:34 PM, Derek JW Cahusac de Caux
<derek at azuregulf.com> wrote:
> Thanks Michael & Quandry for your responses - I'll investigate further along
> the lines you've both suggested but this does raise a few questions, if not
> concerns...
>
> Michael mentioned that 'there hasn't been a huge demand' for packaging which
> makes one wonder what developers are using MD for and how - is there any
> 'public' info on this? Are we looking at tens, hundreds, thousands of MD
> developers..?

We don't have any stats on MD usage, but I'm pretty sure it's at least
in the thousands. However, don't forget that many project types -
ASP.NET, MonoTouch, Silverlight, MonoMac, etc - don't require
packaging. For some apps, zips of binaries are often fine, and for
open-source projects the "done thing" is to release tarballs and have
the distros do their own packaging.

> From looking at the various 'packaging' options out there (almost all seem
> to be command line driven) it seems that this is huge task simply because of
> the open systems arena - packagers are trying to be all things for all
> systems...maybe MD could start by implementing packaging (compiled
> binaries+dependencies+files, installer, launcher and un-installer) for just
> one "system"...any thoughts?

It's a nice thought but it would be very hard to implement properly.
How far down the deps chain do you want to go - glibc and X? Support
for building RPMs and DEBs for just the recent versions of the major
distros is likely a lot easier. Unfortunately, we have limited
resources on the MD team.

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com