"Proper" packaging and distribution

[dotboris]

Problem

Currently, alt is installed using a curl ... | bash one-liner. This is not really acceptable. It works, but it's not a good solution.

There are a few problems with this:

• curl ... | bash is super shady. A lot of people are not fond of installing packages using this.
• There's no good update mechanism. Updating can be done by just re-running the installer
• There's no easy / official uninstall method
• The script doesn't support all platforms (ARM builds are not supported by the install script #31)
• No signing / verification of packages

Solution

The rough idea is to make it so that people can install alt using their system package manager. This is really a two part solution:

1. Build a package
2. Push that package to a repository

This something that should be CI driven as much as possible. The best would be to have all of this done automatically when a new version is pushed.

Platforms support

What follows is a rough list of platforms that we want to support. This list doesn't cover everything. It covers what I currently use and what I current use and need.

• OSX
• Debian and Friends
• Arch linux

References

• The rust cli working group is working on best practices for this https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/cli-wg/issues/8
• Current recommendation for packaging cli apps https://rust-lang-nursery.github.io/cli-wg/tutorial/packaging.html

[dotboris]

I think that at this point we're at a point where we have good enough packaging