Building native packages is complicated

I had known about a tool called nfpm. nfpm lets you specify the filesystem layout of distribution packages in a big ol’ yaml file that got processed and spat out something you can pass to dpkg -i or dnf -y install. The only problem is that it just put the files into the package. This was fine for something like the wallpapers I submitted to the Bluefin project, but the build step was left as an exercise for the reader.

nfpm is part of the GoReleaser project which does this exercise.

oh hey, I just got done doing basically this at work (but using cmake and cpack, so more involved ig)

one problem that is probably still relevant to this is that you need to link against the oldest glibc in the set of repos you want to support: this is probably either Debian or Ubuntu LTS for apt packages, and rocky (8 if you want) or maybe suse for rpm. it seems like this is actually statically linked and dictated by the go toolchain though, so possibly supporting older go versions will be the only option to get all those distros.

I also suspect that alpine is above some of these distros in the “long tail”, but that’s purely vibes based so /shrug