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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps the title needs "on Linux" added to it.

I have a collection of, and written quite a few myself, software which is nothing more than a single EXE. Most of them probably work on anything Win95 and newer. Their "installation" and "uninstallation" are trivial: Extract and run, delete once you've had enough.

In other words, packaging software is something that takes work only because of what might often be unnecessary complexity and a correspondingly bureaucratic process that's grown around it, and not because it necessarily needs to.

"Win32 is the stable Linux ABI" is more than just a meme.

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So, don't need any configuration or preferences, then? It must suck to set up from scratch every time.

InstallShield was invented for a reason: the Win32 devs started dumping crap all over the system, all over the registry, and didn't bother cleaning up after themselves. A cottage industry of file and registry cleaners arose. Soon, software publishers began to learn how to properly package their software to be sustainable, and MS cooperated with Windows features to manage apps. Packaged apps.

It's up to the application to maintain any preferences you set in it. The installer package generally takes care of path configurations, etc. It's amazing how easy it's been to make Win32 installable programs since about 1990.

Uninstall has got to properly clean the registry, and filesystem, and should require manifests.

I cant remember the last time I've uninstalled anything.

It must suck to set up from scratch every time.

What? If you haven't used the software before, what else other than defaults do you?

InstallShield was invented for a reason: the Win32 devs started dumping crap all over the system, all over the registry, and didn't bother cleaning up after themselves

That's a problem created by advocating for use of the registry, but not a necessity.

The single-file apps I have may create a config file alongside the binary, but that's it.

> What? If you haven't used the software before, what else other than defaults do you?

On Windows it (by the time I left it, around 2013) it apparently meant bundling various unrelated stuff (like installing Chrome, toolbars, McAfee antivirus trial). Half of installers had minigame "how to spot and stop crapware bundling".

Or at least asking blatantly obvious questions and lying that I read and accepted piles of legalese written by their lawyers.

Not sure has it got better.

Linux style packaging eliminated this for user, at least in my case.

> Linux style packaging eliminated this for user, at least in my case.

That's in part because of the target audience on Linux was historically of the kind that didn't give a damn about this. Compare how analogous CLI package managers (chocolatey, winget) work on Windows: the first thing after identifying what to install is to query whether you accept relevant licensing terms.

Yeah I don't know about that. In F/OSS there is traditionally no EULA to accept. There is a license to use/modify/share the software, and it may be a page or two long, and most licenses are found in just a few categories, such as MIT, BSD, Apache, GPL. Literally none of these licenses, in their original forms, place any restrictions or conditions on how an end-user can use the software; they're aimed at developers and contributors' use and distribution of the source and binaries.

Also, I don't know how non-Ubuntu package management organizes software, but in Ubuntu, you need to make a conscious decision to include the "nonfree" type of software.

Now presumably for a Linux package manager, any installation action should hopefully import any license terms to a known, readable place for the user to peruse, before launch, if necessary.

Perhaps many Linux users don't care, as you say, but I know a lot more who are exquisitely sensitive to licensing and EULAs and will scrutinize this stuff a lot more than a Windows user who just gobbles shareware from C|NET.

> config file alongside the binary

Which is already what it shouldn't do. The exe may live in a read-only directory that's accessible by all users. Putting config in %HOME%\AppData is not all that different from using the registry.

The exe may live in a read-only directory that's accessible by all users.

Then don't do that. Easily solved by putting it in a more suitable place.

Perhaps if your app was packaged with an installer, you could tell users what not to do with it.

From user viewpoint:

Starting to using Linux the greatest part was no longer dealing with insane install processes. For example, end of game where every Java update was pushing some unrelated software and you needed to be careful to not end with it.

Also, "is it official site for this software or some copy of website or hijacked site" (and around time I left Windows SourceForge was busy with hijacking open source projects and adding malicious software to this downloads, maybe it got better since that time)

If all software would be unpackable and require no configuration by default and leave no waste files over system it would be OK.

That doesn't really align with the number of redistributable installers and "DLL not found" errors I've had to deal with during my Windows life. My wife's Win 10 system always boots to a "some DLL not found" fatal message, but after clicking OK everything seems to work as intended. I can't say I trust the way that system is set up.

I would venture to say you haven’t packaged or shipped any complex software or had to do so in a way that scales to hundreds or thousands of machines. This is along the line of “i could build uber with 50 engineers”.

Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748924 and you may find a whole new world you probably haven't seen before.

You can try to keep on thinking that it doesn't exist, but the truth is there for you to see.

...wait, didn't we have taxi's before computers? Rickshaw, Japan, 1860?

The first (mechanical) computer was made in 1822, and the computer has origins dating back to the 17th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer

The Antikythera mechanism suggests quite a bit of previous art. Making a device for counting wheel rotations wouldn't be very difficult. You could do the billing on a wheel too! One set for each customer! But it would be easier to just do the billing by carving it into a clay tablet.

Then again, taxis date back to at least Ancient Rome (IIRC they found a taximeter device using pebbles to count wheel rotations). And arguably, knowing humans, as soon as we figured out how to reliably use an animal to move a person, someone started offering moving people in exchange for money...

I feel like the killer app for taxi services was central radio dispatch.

> I have a collection of, and written quite a few myself, software which is nothing more than a single EXE.

Trivial software for power users (who can download, run and find the exe again) has trivial packaging. This is the case on any system. Your app has no entry in the start menu, no file type binding, no services, no uninstallation entry in the control panel, no large dependencies, etc.

More correctly, the title could end "unless you only ever target Win32 on x86". Shipping software that's at all portable across operating systems and architectures, that's a different story.

In my experience, that sort of portability is overrated anyway. Win32 on x86 is going to be fine for a majority of users.

The majority of desktop users, perhaps. Most users are going to be customers of a system that likely runs “in the cloud" and that means, by far, Linux.

Nah, even for that. I don't know what gp is on. I recently downloaded a project a friend made on rpgmaker. I had to manually download rpgmaker itself, a dll and a new font. It wasn't a complex project, he isn't even a developer, he mostly make illustrations and graphical assets. It was really, really basic stuff.

That said, I have almost 10 .exe that just work and that I take from computer to computer since 2015, like I have around 30 .sh/.py/.lisp that i do too. Being charitable, I think GP just have a lot of scripts/small tools that just work, and he was referring to that.

It works on my machine!

That's why I love so much the AppImage project. Just download, double click, and you can execute whatever you want.

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