[Gambas-user] Distributing a package for a non-gambas/programer end user

[Tobias Boege]

On Fri, 13 Aug 2021, martin p cristia wrote:
> So I am finishing a piece of software and was trying to deploy a release in
> Git, just for initial testing. Then I made the .deb and tried to run it
> trough the Ubuntu Software manager in a new and clean system installation.
> It refused to install it due to lack of dependencies.
> 
> Inspecting the .deb found that no gambas binaries are in there, and Ubuntu
> didn't ask permission to install them prior to my program.
> 
> Am I doing something wrong?
> 
> Or the .deb works only in a system with the correct gambas runtimes already
> installed???
> 

Which error messages do you receive exactly? In the meantime, my crystal
ball suggests:

  - By "gambas binaries [missing from the .deb]" you mean the Gambas
    runtime. You mistakenly assume that the Gambas runtime is packaged
    with every project .deb. This is not the case. The Gambas runtime
    is just added as a dependency to the .deb file. The idea is that
    the user installs the distribution-provided Gambas once and for
    all of their Gambas applications. I can generate a package for
    a project on a Slackware system with my highly customized Gambas
    interpreter, but you will still install the one provided by your
    distribution when you install my package on Ubuntu.

    It *is* intended that the Gambas runtime package is installed as
    a dependency by your package manager during installation of the
    project .deb. If those dependencies are missing from the .deb
    altogether, that's an error in Gambas.

    But if by "gambas binaries" you mean the .gambas file of your
    project -- yes, that should also *not* be missing from the .deb.

  - The missing dependencies error is actually an error about not
    finding the requested *version* of Gambas (or did Ubuntu remove
    Gambas from their repositories recently?).

    This is because you created the .deb with a newer version of Gambas
    than Ubuntu offers. This new version puts its own version number
    as the Gambas dependency because it assumes by default that you use
    all the new features of the current version. (You can lower the
    version requirement in the package creation wizard at some point.)

    Since Gambas on Ubuntu is regularly outdated and your system
    is a fresh install, you have not added the PPA you use on your
    development machine and the dependency cannot be satisfied.

Best,
Tobias

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