[Gambas-user] Need help with packaging application for distribution

[Tobias Boege]

On Tue, 17 Jul 2018, Vinode Singh Ujlain wrote:
> Dear Benoît,
> 

I'm Tobias, but maybe that's enough.

> 1. Need your help. I finished a project using Gambas 3.11.2.  I made a
> installation package for Linux Mint 18.2 (being my development machine), it
> works fine. However package for Red-hat/Fedora (RPM) gets made but doesn't
> install and it says following dependencies are missing :-
> 
> Requires: gambas3-runtime >= 3.11,gambas3-runtime < 3.99.0,gambas3-gb-image
> >= 3.11,gambas3-gb-image < 3.99.0,gambas3-gb-form >= 3.11,gambas3-gb-form <
> 3.99.0,gambas3-gb-db >= 3.11,gambas3-gb-db < 3.99.0,gambas3-gb-db-sqlite3 >=
> 3.11,gambas3-gb-db-sqlite3 < 3.99.0,gambas3-gb-settings >=
> 3.11,gambas3-gb-settings < 3.99.0,gambas3-gb-util-web >=
> 3.11,gambas3-gb-util-web < 3.99.0
> 

I'm not a Fedora user, so take this with a grain of salt: A web search
indicates that Fedora is still on Gambas 3.10, so you can't satisfy the
version requirements.

> 2. *Is there anyway to include these libraries/binaries etc .. in a single
> package?* I need to install the package on 25 standalone alone (not
> connected to Internet for security reasons) and going around installing
> Gambas on all machines is not a feasible solution.
> 

Probably not. I bet that not many package formats support multiple packages
in one. Apparently .deb doesn't, which seems to be relevant for you.
Of course, you shouldn't ship the contents of multiple packages combined
into one new, large, conflicting package either. (Remember: if you pull in
gb.db.sqlite3, you probably want to pull in sqlite3, too, and next week
all of QT5 and X11.)

In any case, I'm pretty sure I went through half a dozen Gambas (and more)
installs of an entire computer lab on the order of 20 computers in high
school, and this is not a question of feasibility. If you install gambas3,
the package manager will take care of resolving all the dependencies for you,
so I don't see where the huge timesink might be. In fact, that task should be
fairly common to search for solutions online. I remember that I used a local
package cache server back then. This way, you download the Gambas packages
once, verify them, of course, put them on the cache server and let your
non-internet-connected clients use that cache in your local network instead
of the official repositories to install Gambas.

And I'm sure there are a dozen other ways to do that. However, the Gambas IDE
doesn't know how to do any of that for you.

Regards,
Tobi

-- 
"There's an old saying: Don't change anything... ever!" -- Mr. Monk