Re: Installation script for Linux.

[Tor Lillqvist <tml iki fi>]

 > On 10/18/06, Magnus Myrefors <myrefors magnus telia com> wrote:

 > > I wonder where I can find (detailed) information about making installation
 > > scripts for an application which should be run in Linux.

Paul Davis writes:
 > Using autotools suite:
 > http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/

Well, we don't know what he meant with "installation script", so we
can hardly know whether autotools is the answer.

Magnus, what exactly do you mean with "installation scripts"?  Did you
mean something that is run to build the application from sources and
install it on one machine? (In that case autotools is indeed the most
popular way to do this task for Open Source software, although some
important software packages don't use it.)

Or did you mean something that is run on end-user machines to install
software that has already been built, and which is provided as
binaries (and other files needed at run-time) in some kind of archive,
like a tar archive, CD-ROM or on a network file server?

In that case, if you are talking about "normal" Linux software, you
definitely should use the package mechanism of each Linux
distribution. Yes, unfortunately, if your application has precise
dependencies on library versions and whatnot, this might mean you need
a different package for each "major" distribution, or even each major
release of each major distribution. Or, maybe you can manage with just
one .rpm and one .deb package. (RPM and deb are the package formats
used by the major distributions.)

On the other hand, as a former sysadmin that worked at a site where
very expensive EDA (Electronid Design Automation) software, I know
that some vendors of such software (where a typical version release
might contain several CD-ROMs worth of stuff, most of which obviously
is not executable binaries but data) that provided their software for
Linux (and not just Solaris and HP-UX) did not use any Linux package
format at all. They just had long interactive shell scripts, with a
long history, to be used on all POSIX platforms they supported, on
their media. Perhaps this is the kind of "script" you are referring
to?

--tml