How Do You Distribute?
December 22, 2007 – 3:10 pmThis poll at dev2ops.com reminded me that I still have to come up with a lecture on software deployment for next term’s CSC301 (”Introduction to Software Engineering”). It’s a topic most of the classic texts ignore or skim over, but in my experience, getting software onto people’s desktops (or onto the app server, if that’s the route you’ve chosen), and getting it configured, is often as big a challenge as making it work in the first place.
So: what do you do? And what advice would you give someone who’s about to start doing it? I’m looking for something between an InstallAnywhere or RPM tutorial, and a hand-waving 10,000-meter overview full of irrefutable banalities.
One Response to “How Do You Distribute?”
Hi, Greg
I’d talk about several ways to distribute software:
* source archive (tar.gz)
* svn/cvs checkouts (for bleeding edge versions)
* binary distributions (RPM, windows MSI)
* package distribution as part of the OS utilities (apt-get, yum)
There’s no silver bullet here, as is the case with everything software-related, but if you cover these aspects I think your students will have a pretty good grasp of the existing choices.
Grig
By Grig Gheorghiu on Dec 22, 2007