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by mkhpalm
3844 days ago
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Curious, why the scripts to install a simple series of binaries? If you packaged it natively then all the stuff you're doing with both GPG and install.sh simplifies dramatically from 2k lines of bash. With added benefit of pushing out security updates or releases becomes pretty simple. |
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- There is sadly no universal package manager on Linux.
- A lot of that 2k-line bash script is implementing an interactive setup that configures your server, optionally claims a hostname and obtains SSL certificates, etc. A package manager wouldn't replace any of that.
- Sandstorm's auto-updater will automatically update your server within 24 hours of any release. That's actually pretty hard to achieve with package managers. Most are not designed to auto-run in a cron job. Worse, many distros have long release cycles (6 months, 2 years, etc.) during which they only accept bugfixes.
- Most package managers don't verify PGP signatures back to the upstream author, but rather to the distro maintainer (which in Debian's case is any one of thousands of people). It's debatable which is preferable, but note in any case that it's a very different property from what our installer implements.
- Sandstorm self-containerizes in its own corner of the filesystem, basically avoiding any dependency on the rest of your system other than the kernel. This strategy works well for us -- it relieves us from having to test on every distro separately, and it avoids messing up the user's system -- but it probably wouldn't meet the guidelines required to get a package into a distro. So we'd still have to distribute our packages direct from our own server, or do a _lot_ more work.
With all that said, when Sandstorm stabilizes more we do plan to figure out a way to let people "apt-get install sandstorm", since a lot of people are more comfortable with this.