Self contained programs (vs installers).

[vromero]

This is just an idea proposal to support distribution of actual programs with makeself vs containers.

I have a command line tool, multiple files, etc. That for the sake of the CI systems, I'd like to distribute as a single .sh.

I've tried makeself and it worked great, but there are a couple of gimmicks here and there:

• the generated file has its own cli and help, this would be confusing to the use of my cli tool that of course has its own commands and help.
• the --quiet option cannot be passed by default and therefore the decompression and checking part is not hidden.

Perhaps this falls out of the scope of makeself, but I personally found it interesting enough to be proposed.

Thanks

[refi64]

Question: couldn't you also use AppImages for this?

[megastep]

This is an interesting concept, and one for which I'd be open to make improvements to Makeself for it. As you know it was mostly designed as a packaging format which in turns could be used to run a proper installer.

I was not familiar with the AppImages thing, but it looks interesting. Reminds me a little bit of the way apps are bundled on macOS for instance. I have shipped a lot of native binaries for various Linux/Unix distributions via Makeself, and there are usually a lot of issues with dependencies (particularly shared system libraries) that can get in the way. This could possibly work well for mostly scripted apps, or apps that have been linked statically to reduce any dependencies though.

[vromero]

Question: couldn't you also use AppImages for this?

Yes, although that would only work in Linux.

I was not familiar with the AppImages thing, but it looks interesting. Reminds me a little bit of the way

I was specifically thinking in this whole new world of Java apps bundled with a very small VM thanks to jlink. It seemed a low hanging fruit, specially due to the fact that there is already a maven plugin supporting makeself and hence my idea/proposal.