[Gambas-user] New Gambas User - Stupid Question

[Bob Hodges]

Excellent answer, and exactly what I was looking for.  Thank you for the direct honesty, it helped me understand that Gambas - as cool as it is - is most definitely not for me.  At least not at this time.

Dang, the one true "VB for Linux" I find - that works GREAT - and it turns out to be an app distribution nightmare.  This is a major disappointment considering how cool this product is and how well it works.  But there's no such thing as a "killer app" that can't be distributed.  Sadly, Gambas brings to light a very difficult achilles heel of Linux in general - out of control library dependencies.  It's like trying to herd cats.  It's utterly futile.

Back to trusty ol' Windows, VB and InstallShield, I guess.  At least until the Mono project gets serious about VB, because right now it's still pretty much all about C#.

Again, thanks for the info.  I'll check back on Gambas in another year or so and see what's happening.





-----Original Message-----
From: gambas-user-bounces at lists.sourceforge.net
[mailto:gambas-user-bounces at lists.sourceforge.net]On Behalf Of Eilert
Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2006 12:42 AM
To: mailing list for gambas users
Subject: Re: [Gambas-user] New Gambas User - Stupid Question


There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers, Bob.

I hope this isn't one of those... :-)

Bob Hodges schrieb:
> 
> I'm used to using Visual Basic and InstallShield to distribute my apps.
> 
> Now for my stupid Gambas question:
> 
> How on earth do you distribute a Gambas app?  What needs to be included?  How do you package it into an installer?  Is it a horrible mess?  Is there such a thing as a stand-alone distributable app in Linux, and is Gambas capable of it?
> 


In contrary to Windows, Linux has an ever growing number of 
distributions with different versions of libraries. Gambas projects 
depend on a number of libraries such as Qt. The point is that there 
isn't "one Qt" but a couple of different versions on the users' 
computers. And there are more libraries than Qt Gambas depends on, all 
of which might slightly differ from those you as the developer have on 
your PC.

Distributing a Gambas app as a package would mean making a collection of 
all those libraries necessary for YOUR Gambas and for THIS app on YOUR 
computer and distributing them with the package, having a package 
managing system involved which checks these libraries and their version 
against those on the client's PC, installing them if necessary, make 
them known to the package manager on that PC and thus bringing the app 
to life. This includes the Gambas interpreter itself which might be 
there in different versions.

Up to now, nobody really has dared to take up with this task. There is 
an option "Make distribution package..." in the Gambas menue, but I 
don't know what it actually does since I've never used it yet, and there 
might be progress in the 1.9... series on this which I do not use currently.

So the easiest way to make it run on other computers is to install 
Gambas on that PC (download and ./configure, make, make install has at 
least the advantage of a Gambas that really fits to every bit on that 
machine) and then run the Gambas app there.

Regards

Rolf

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