Is conveyer the way to go for modern packagind/dis...

# compose-desktop

[Colton Idle]

Is conveyer the way to go for modern packagind/dist/udpates? or do people have another competitor i should check out?

[Adam Brown]

thats pretty much it, especially for MSIX

[Adam Brown]

I spent a little time looking into MSIX building aaanndd... wtf was Microsoft thinking?! It's madness. Snap, Flatpack, they are basically zip files with some meta data. MSIX is... madness.

[chr]

Compose Multiplatform comes with some packaging support but there’s no support for cross-compilation…ie, if you want to build for windows, you need to compile on windows

[chr]

(And no support for updates/distribution)

[Adam Brown]

I use Github actions to build each of my release artifacts, currently only using the Compose Multiplatform packaging support. But I plan to eventually use conveyer to build an MSIX

[Adam Brown]

I've found some other Github actions for making a Flatpak too, but haven't tried it yet

[benkuly]

MSIX can also be packaged and signed using MSIXHero CLI. If you want auto-update you can write an appinstaller-xml pointing to the msix.

[mikehearn]

MSIX is .... the result of someone writing a design doc, handing it off and not supervising the implementation (my guess). An MSIX is also a zip with metadata. Where the paradigm breaks down is the way they did the block map and signing. Indeed whilst you can extract an MSIX using `unzip`the only way to create one is to implement your own zip library from scratch. Which is what we've done with Conveyor.

[mikehearn]

Flatpak's distribution format is also pretty wild mind you (ostree). It's a space that seems simple on the surface but has a surprising zoo of approaches.