Ask the main part of your question in the title. This should be concise but informative.
Provide everything up front. Don't make people fish for more details in the comments. Provide background information and examples.
Be present for follow up questions. Don't ask for help and run away. Stick around to answer questions and provide more details.
Ask about the problem you're trying to solve. Don't focus too much on debugging your exact solution, as you may be going down the wrong path. Include as much information as you can about what you ultimately are trying to achieve. See more on this here: https://xyproblem.info/
Icon base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient
Just build the app on very old distros like Ubuntu 16.04 if possible. But in general, packaging should be handled by the maintainer. If you want to be both a developer and maintainer, packaging problems will take up 75% of your time.
It's not really hard for us users to follow your README and just copy the built binary to ~/.local/bin.
Hi thanks for the reply. Could you elaborate on why building for an old distro may be benefitial/a good solution? Thanks for mentioning this developer/maintainer dynamic. It's not a concept I was aware of.
Do you have any projects with good READMEs you could point me to, so I can get an idea of what's important to address?
If you build your app with glibc 2.32 and then run it with glibc 2.39, it will run fine. But it won't work the other way around.
There is no best README template, but for my personal projects I use this:
You can find an example here. I'm not saying this is the best README, but I think it's simple and informative.
You don't have to!
If a downstream distribution wants your software they will build and package it themselves and maintain that infrastructure.
You could provide an example rpm spec (etc) to make their lives easier but it's not on you to provide a binary package that works everywhere; you released the source code so any given user / distro can compile it for themselves.
Just make sure that your build infrastructure and docs are up to speed, and ideally implement some CI/CD and testing to catch any breaking changes.
I see, thanks for the info. I wasn't even aware that this developer/maintainer dynamic exists. It makes a lot of sense though. I'll start by creating some documentation about building the software and then maybe create an example package for rpm.
This dynamic does exist, but you have to build something useful to the likes of Debian and Redhat and that’s a tall order. You should look into Linux brew, it’s a community maintained package management system that might be more suitable for your scale https://docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-on-Linux
This only applies if your program becomes popular or you go to a huge amount of effort packaging it yourself. And even then updates are going to be a huge pain. Do you want your users to be able to use the latest version easily?
There's quite a big gap between "no users" and "included in all distros" where this advice doesn't apply.
the best possible "industry standard" in my opinion is nix, but people need to install it on their machine, other than that don't package lol, put a curl link in your github/gitlab to how install it and problem solved lol
I have seen some CLI tools distributed via docker. You build a docker image and push to dockerhub, then supply a commandline like:
docker run -it -v workdir:workdir myapp:latest myapp [my app args]
~~I cant think of an IRL example for this, but I have seen it a few times.~~
My own example: https://github.com/cameroncros/idevicerestore/tree/docker-container?tab=readme-ov-file#docker
Just make sure you have good build instructions and maybe an install target to put it in /usr/local/bin
If you're using C/C++ with Meson it will handle this for you, so long as your targets have install: true set. As other users have said it may get picked up eventually by a distro.
If you want to create packages there is this tool which is used by LACT (AMD GPU overclocking tool) to generate rpms and debs from a single manifest: https://github.com/vv9k/pkger/
Flatpak seems to be the way most people are doing it now.
Prior to that, it was mostly just packaging an npm and/or deb file and telling anyone not on a redhat/debian system to build it themselves.
Flatpak is for GUI applications. For CLI tooling the distro package managers are still the way to go.
Statically link it with Musl instead. Then you don't have do deal with bullshit glibc issues.
For distribution I package my Rust programs as Pip packages using Maturin. Theoretically you can do the same with any language but I've only tried Rust.
Why on earth would I publish pure Rust programs on PyPI you ask? I stole the idea from CMake, which is distributed there too despite being completely C++. The main advantage is that your users probably already have Pip installed no matter what distro they are using. Maybe even on Mac too. And installation is a single command. No fannying around adding custom repos and keys, making 5 different kinds of packages, etc.