packthing 0.2.2

Write once, package everywhere

Why another packaging thing?

One of the most frustrating aspects of starting a new project is figuring out how to package it for release. No matter what shiny framework you have, once you leave the safety of generating a plain old binary, all bets are off and you’re left to figure out how to get said binary to your customers.

What’s more, it’s a problem that rarely needs to be solved more than once, and so many of the resources on the subject are few and far between, which makes it all the more frustrating.

The goal of Packthing is to create a language-agnostic, high-level integration tool that does the work for you, making your application fit for human consumption. It intends to support interoperability between:

• Multiple version control systems

• Many output formats (windows installer, mac bundle, pkg, tar, debian, rpm, apk, and so on and so forth).

• Many build systems

Famously described as a glorified convenience wrapper, packthing is here to make your life easy.

It’s a super project!

Multiple version control systems

Say someone wrote an awesome Python app with Mercurial for version control, someone else wrote a cool C++ app using bjam, and yet another person wrote a native C app using scons and SVN. Packthing let’s you ignore for a moment that they all came from different places.

Packthing projects use version control, but exist outside of it, forming a super repository of smaller projects, defined by a JSON file.

{
    "info": {
        "org": "bazzbar industries",
        "name": "Frobnicator",
        "package": "frob",
        "url": "http://frobby.io"
    },
    "repo": [
        {
            "path": "frobtool",
            "url": "https://github.com/frob/frobtool.git",
            "type": "qmake",
            "master": true,
            "icon": "icons/propellerhat.png"
        },
        {
            "path": "frobdocs",
            "url": "https://github.com/frob/frob-docs.git",
            "type": "dir"
        }
    ]
}

Packthing then fetchs the dependencies and auto-populates all the needed information to package the project for a variety of formats.

Multiple package formats

Build your application into a windows installer, mac bundle, pkg, tar, Debian RPM, APK, and many more. packthing provides a generic abstraction between the build system and the packaging system, so you can all but forget what the final project layout actually looks like.

Future

At present, the focus has been on supporting Qt applications, but there are other multiply cross-platform environments where a tool such as this would be useful. Possible future targets include:

• scons (C++)

• distutils (Python)

• CMake

Packthing does not attempt to support every possible configurations all of the time. Rather, it’s goal is to do a good enough job for more common use cases first, with the possibility of finer-grained controls in the future.

So use packthing because you want to get the thing out the door. Now, please!

NOTE: Packthing is in the early stages of development. Currently only triplets including Git and Qt are supported.

Usage

Setting up your project to use packthing

First, write up a config file for your project, and save as packthing.json. This file should be checked in to your project but does not depend on your project. You should be able to download the config file separately to use packthing.

This config will include a single project repository. packthing is useful for both single- and multi-repository projects!

Building a package

Type packthing -h or packthing --help to get a nice pretty help output.

usage: packthing [-h] [-r REPO] [-c DIR] [-l LEVEL] [-a NAME] [--list-src]
               [--list-build] [-j JOBS] [--refresh]
               [TARGET]

packthing - make working with your project more complicated

...