| >Cross-platform app distribution is a hard problem! indeed, but couple of things specific to Mac OS X: there are homebrew, macports, fink and probably more distributing with homebrew to someone who already going with macports is problematic for example as it is advised to not have both installed. One alternative is to distribute a pkg and so use PackageMaker to build one. A pkg has the pros to be native to Apple, but the cons to not work for other systems like Windows and Linux. So here another alternative: Debian packages (deb). Wether with macports, homebrew or fink you can install the command line utility dpkg, and using dpkg-deb you can build deb supporting the darwin-amd64 arch. For Windows, you can use the utility wpkg, http://windowspackager.org/
and with it you can build deb packages for win32 and win64 architectures. Ultimately if you distribute command-line tools (not GUI app),
you can use deb packages for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux Debian (Ubuntu etc.) Here an example (one of my tools that I need to distrib/install on servers): https://github.com/Corsaair/as3shebang/releases/tag/1.0.0 Debian packages for everyone :) Linux and Mac OS X install: dpkg -i as3shebang_1.0.0_amd64.deb Windows install: wpkg -i as3shebang_1.0.0_win64.deb You can see the build scripts at the root of the repo, they are pretty similar. Also, once you have deb packages you can also convert them to rpm and other nix-like packages usinga tool like alien, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(software). |