Kotlin Native is truly kind of major cool for the ...

# kotlin-native

[pajatopmr]

Kotlin Native is truly kind of major cool for the notion of building platform independent desktop apps. However, “deploy” is somewhat unclear to me as I do not believe there is a platform independent package management tool (ala Homebrew or Gems or such). Is anyone aware of such a tool or strategy towards making one?

[Egor Trutenko]

Why would you need one apart from Gradle? Being compiled, K/N does not need to gather any more dependencies as it is self-contained executable. Multiplatform Gradle is used to fetch dependencies and build output files

[pajatopmr]

Gradle is ok for developers, but let’s say I write a really cool game that my grandmother just loves to play. Having her fetch, build and start it from Gradle or, heaven forbid, Intellij, is a non-starter. A decent model for macos is Homebrew where I might tell Grandma to execute brew install MySolitaire in a terminal, which is problematic because of the terminal. Gotta be a better way.

[pajatopmr]

And I suspect that a klib is key to the eventual answer.

[Strum355]

Wouldn't you build the binaries for the platforms you care about and distribute those?

[pajatopmr]

That's the exact issue. How does one distribute those binaries? I can imagine them deployed to something akin to Maven Central. Next step is getting them to Grandma. Each of Linux, Windows, and Mac has different ways to do this, none involving a klib however.

[pajatopmr]

Probably not a Kotlin lang issue however, but an interesting problem nevertheless.

[Dico]

You can just put them up on any file sharing service. Those binaries are not really meant to be used as a dependency in projects at all so, no, it won't be on maven central.

[kenkyee]

If it's UI related, use something like izpack (free) or InstallAnywhere).
For open source command line tools, you'll have to hook into apt, Homebrew, etc.