Releasing for Ubuntu

Question

I've built a few pieces of C++ software I want to release for Ubuntu. What ways are there and what can you recommend? Is building .deb files and setting up an apt repo for them the best way? What about make install, is it considered an acceptable way to install software?

By far simplest for me, and perhaps most transparent for the user, would be to just have a github repository in which one could run make install to get all programs installed at one go.

Do I always install the binaries into /usr/bin?

One of the programs contains Python 3 library code, should that be installed in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages? (I don't want to create a pip package, that would make the installation harder -- and waste more of my time.) The program also contains Python 3 examples/tutorials intended for the user to tweak and learn from, where do I install those? Do I create a ~/my-prog-tutorial-dir/ to put them in? If so: how should I name that directory?

Edit: if I simply release the statically linked binaries in a tarball, what will break eventually? Libc? Are there any major application APIs that usually change between Ubuntu LTSs? I only use pthreads, X11 and OpenGL so I suspect statically linked binaries could be a fairly stable option?

Answer 1

In general, building a binary package will make your software much easier for your users to install and keep up to date. The same goes for python packages. There are generally tools to generate apt packages from pip packages, so you can just list your python code as a dependency of your binary package(s).

You may see packaging and installers as a waste of your time, but only providing a source distribution wastes your users' time. Users don't want to constantly have to check github for new versions, and they often don't want to have to install all of your build dependencies if they just want to use your software. If your software is targeted towards developers this may be less of an issue, but it's still extra work that your users have to go through.

As for examples, the general convention is to put those in /usr/share/doc/myprogram/samples or a samples directory in your python package.

Answer 2

I was asked to expand my comment in an answer, and so I do.

The project I was talking about is called Woodpecker hash Bruteforce, and I distribute it as plain archived executables for Mac OS, Windows and Linux.

Woodpecker hash Bruteforce has only two dependencies I have to care about (the users don't need to install anything): OpenSSL and Botan - libraries to do hashing. I've got two virtual machines on my Mac where I build the project and several scripts to automate the process. I'm using Docker (in collaboration with VirtualBox) and VMware Fusion.

Above I said the users don't need to worry about any third-party libraries because everything's linked statically with the executable: you just download the appropriate file from the official website, unarchive it (if needed), sudo chmod +x the executable and that's it!

This works on any version of Linux, including Ubuntu (this is where I perform the build) and Kali Linux.