Download Actyx or CLI with standard package managers

[mhaushofer]

Problem to solve

When:

• I want to download Actyx or the Actyx CLI

I want to:

• use the package manager I am familiar with

So that:

• It takes less time to setup Actyx
• I can automate setting up Actyx

Acceptance criteria

• [ ] Actyx and Actyx CLI available on Windows Package Manager (winget)
• [ ] Actyx and Actyx CLI available on brew
• [ ] Brief installation shell script that downloads Actyx and Actyx CLI and puts them into /usr/local/bin

We decided to not support a Linux package manager for the reasons described in Rolands comment.

[wngr]

Did users really request snap packages?

[mhaushofer]

Yep, they did (although this is probably not really a "robust" sample as most of our users do not use Linux at all). Do Linux users use something else in your experience?

[rkuhn]

I know that from personal experience and speaking with other Linux admins in the past

• they don’t like installing software that does not come with Debian stable (well, as a figure of speech, but somewhat accurate)
• there is no good nor nice way of delivering software in a distribution agnostic fashion
• Steam is distributed as a snap and it is no fun to debug the issues my daughter is having with that
• my own encounter with trying to build snap packages was brief and intensely painful, in a bodily sense

Since our software is a single binary and statically linked, we already have the ideal packaging as envisioned by Ken Thompson and friends over 50 years ago, when Unix was born. Why don’t we provide a very brief installation shell script that downloads two binaries and puts them into /usr/local/bin?

Regarding Windows I haven’t surveyed the choices, I heard of Chocolatey and NuGET before. brew for macOS seems like the obvious choice.

[mhaushofer]

Ok, I changed the acceptance criteria to reflect the Linux part. Windows recently (last year) introduced the Windows Package Manager, so I think we should use that one.