Best universal application format with BSD & Linux Support?
reddit / BSD

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OverallGain · 2018-08-17 00:17

I'm not a BSD user, but have helped with some development projects. Is
their any file format for apps that is easy to use and supports BSD?
Do [AppImages](https://appimage.org/) work with BSD? What about
[.jar](https://hci.rwth-aachen.de/borchers-old/cs377a/JAR.html) files?

I have some apps that I would like to help push for BSD development
and think it would help if we could support both Linux and BSD with
the same build.

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[deleted] · 2018-08-17 00:25

> I have some apps that I would like to help push for BSD development
and think it would help if we could support both Linux and BSD with
the same build.

Glad you think so. What sort of apps are we talking about? Also, which
BSDs are you thinking of targeting? The three classic variants are
FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, but there are others.

> Is their any file format for apps that is easy to use and supports
BSD?

If you make the source code available, and it isn't completely
dependent on glibc and Linux system calls, it shouldn't be that hard
to port to BSD.

> Do AppImages work with BSD? What about .jar files?

I don't think AppImage itself has been ported to any of the BSDs. .jar
files should be OK for Java apps. The ideal, however, would be clean
and well-documented source code. If you want to port it yourself, I'm
sure the effort would be appreciated. Otherwise, if there's demand for
it and the source is available, somebody will step up and port it
themselves.

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FUZxxl · 2018-08-17 11:28

Note that the various BSD variants are different operating systems,
they aren't just like different Linux distributions and it's hard to
speak about all BSD variants at the same time, so let me just talk
about FreeBSD.

Java works on FreeBSD, AppImages do not.  I don't think the average
FreeBSD user would be happy with an AppImage anyway.

Generally, the most fruitful approach is to provide your application
as source code and compile it on the target machine.  That's how UNIX
works and what people expect.  You can also provide a FreeBSD binary
in a tar ball, that works, too.  FreeBSD users aren't too keen on
weird special case solutions (even self-extracting shell script
archives are a bit of a headache), so try to stick to a mundane
solution.

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bengerbil · 2018-08-17 16:35

awk scripts.

Just make sure you don't use any crazy gawk extensions.

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practical_lem · 2018-08-17 17:10

tar.gz

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vermaden · 2018-08-18 13:51

The JAR files work on FreeBSD but I am not sure if JAVA is the best
way for this.

How about just plain PYTHON + TK/TCL or GTK?

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vvelox · 2018-08-22 07:10

Python scripts/libraries as far as cross distro/OS compatibility has
been hit and miss from my experience. Although no where near as bad as
Ruby.

Perl is by far the most friendly language I've come across in regards
to this.