this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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How to efficiently package CLI application on linux (lemmy.world)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/learn_programming
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Hi, I'm looking to open-source a small CLI application I wrote and I'm struggling with how to provide the built app since just providing the binary will not work. I had a friend test it and he had to compile from source due to glibc version differences.

My first thought was providing it as a flatpak but that isn't really suitable for CLI software.

I've googled around a bit and most guides I find just mention packaging separately for multiple package managers/formats (rpm, apt etc.). This seems really inefficient/hard to maintain. What is the industry standard for packaging a Linux software for multi-distro use?

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[–] fourwd 7 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] fourwd 1 points 7 months ago

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:

  1. Title
  • Brief description of the project
  • Features
  1. Build
  • List of supported OS
  • List of dependencies (what packages do I need to build your application)
  • Commands to build the application (what do I need to do to build your application)
  • Binary Locations (where can I find the built binary)
  1. Usage
  • Program arguments (what do I need to provide to use your CLI application)

You can find an example here. I'm not saying this is the best README, but I think it's simple and informative.