where do we put packaging stuff

[b1ek]

personally, i think we should let packages live their own live and be maintained by people not related to amber, as there is an unlimited number of different packaging systems and i dont think that it is even amber's responsibility to maintain.

the problem right now is that we have a nix, arch, snap packages already out there, and a deb/rpm packages proposed. arch package lives its own life in the aur, while all the others are in the repo, and we even have a CI workflow for snap

[b1ek]

my point is: our responsibility is to build and maintain the language. maintaining packages for different systems is not. if someone wants to port amber to their ecosystem, its their want and therefore their responsibility to maintain, not ours.

[Ph0enixKM]

I agree. But we should maintain at least the simplest packages that would enable people use the language much easier. The nix package also lives it's own life. I propose to create repo for just the brew tap as it can live it's own life and we'd be done with the whole packaging stuff.

There is also an issue from @Mte90 that's suggests adding RPM / DEB packages. I think that we should keep as minimal as possible for now and focus on what really matters - the compiler itself.

[Mte90]

My idea is that the CI automatically generate those packages on a new release but is not on my watchlist right now.
After all we are still in alpha.

[Ph0enixKM]

The most important platform undoubtedly is Linux. Then macOS for the developers and because it's also posix and has Bash installed, and then Windows.

We could just support:

• Linux:
  • Debian based distributions - .deb
  • Arch - AUR package
  • Ubuntu - Snap package
• MacOS: brew package (or just the shell script installer)
• Windows: windows .exe binary

[b1ek]

i maintain the AUR package independently from amber. im not sure how exactly would it work if it was official, the AUR is kind of its own thing with independent rules on how maintainers are replaced