Cross platform patching - cross-platform

I have a program that I intend to install on Linux and Windows machines. I have it cross-compiling fine (with autotools), but at some point I would like the program to be able to update its binaries. The only ways I can think of doing this are:
Give users write access to "C:\Program Files\Foo Program" or "/usr/bin/foo_program".
or
Install the program to the user's profile/home directory.
Neither of these seems like a good idea. What would you do?

You need to give us more details on what you are trying to do - I don't understsand the link between cross platform, patching and your question.
If you need to be able to auto update the program, on linux at least, the best solution is to provide a binary package (rpm, deb, whatever, depending on your target), which is updated regularly - so that new versions will be picked up by the package manager. On windows and mac os x, things are usually more decentralized, each program has its own update manager. The best technical solution depends on the technology (C/C++/python/whatever). One exception I can think of on Linux is vmplayer, which tells you when there is a new version - but you still have to install the new version.

If the program binary is writeable, you could download the patch or the new bits to %TEMP% or /tmp then apply them to the binary. I don't think you need to be able to create new files in the directory. But you're going to run into problems on Windows with the file being in use while you try and patch it.

Related

How do you programatically find out where NuGet.exe is installled on a given machine?

Assuming that I have a script that will be run on a clean build server with Nuget.exe installed on it, what is the best way to programatically determine the path for where NuGet.exe is installed?
Is there a way to infer its location by going through NuGet.targets, or reading some sort of external config file, or following some sort of convention?
Note: The closest question I've seen so far is this one that points to where NuGet can be downloaded, but I'm not interested in downloading NuGet manually. I need a way to determine where it is installed, but I'm not sure if there's a convention that I can follow to determine where it might be installed.
In general, nuget.exe is not shipped with any product. Most people need to manually download it.
The only exception is for people who install Mono. Mono ships nuget.exe, but that's generally limited to people developing on Linux or Mac. But people who use .NET Core exclusively don't need Mono, even on Linux/Mac, so they won't have it either.
Few developers on Windows install Mono, so chances are you don't have a nuget.exe on your system unless you downloaded it yourself, or someone checked it into a repo that you cloned.

Lua SDK for IntelliJ on a Linux system?

Trying to set up IntelliJ IDEA with the Lua plugin. This requires me to direct it to the location of a Lua SDK. All instructions I have been able to find for this are on a Windows system, pointing to a specific directory in Program Files. I am running a Linux system. I've built and installed Lua 5.3.4 (newest version at time of writing) from source, but as far as I can tell that doesn't include any equivalent to the SDK needed – it just drops a variety of necessary files in /usr/local/{bin,include,lib,man/man1} and creates two empty directories /usr/local/{lib,share}/lua/5.3.
Am I missing something conceptual? Do I need to get something else (the existence of which I have been unable to confirm)? Should I just give up on this and find another IDE? The plugin seems to come with two SDKs, Kahlua and LuaJ, but I don't know how well either of these match up to either standard Lua or LuaJit, which are what I would be using.
This is assuming you are using this Lua plugin for IntelliJ:
If you have installed Lua via DNF or yum simply guide IntelliJ to /urs/bin and it'll find it. (I assume this also works for other installers like apt or brew.)
It looks like the SDK is just looking for two files lua and luac which both live in /usr/bin.

How to obtain all versions of KRE?

Problem
I want to both use stable versions of KRE and the bleeding edge nightly built KRE. One ASP.NET5 application may be beta2, but another I may want to be beta4. So what I did was install both in powershell as found here.
What happened is that the stable KVM installed in C:/Users/derp/.kre and the nightly build KVM installed in C:/Users/derp/.k
Worse yet, I can only see this now
Attempts
I tried kvm install KRE-CLR-x86.1.0.0-beta2 and it failed
Shall I try moving the packages from /kre file to the /.k file? This seems hacky and like a really bad idea
RTFM - Tried to use the install feature and including the -a, but failed.
I'm doing something the hard way and can't see the obvious.
I search on here
I feel if there is an answer to what I am trying to do above, it is worth being on here for others to find as well. Thank you all for your patience.
ASP.NET 5 is under development and there is no guarantee that changes between different pre-release version are backward compatible (sorry!).
The /.kre -> ./k rename is not backward compatible and you cannot have both the old and the new kvm simultaneously on the PATH. However, you can get can have two versions of kvm on your machine but you will have to use the full path for at least one of them.
I think the key is the path environment variable of your system. You have to use two set of "kvm", one for night builds, one for public beta, to download and set correct path environment variable.
For instance, I get one kvm from Entity Framework 7 repository, which can download and use beta 4 builds. I also have another kvm from Home repository which can download and use public beta builds.
You can use either kvm with "upgrade" or "use" command to set correct path environment variable, then run your application on the runtime you need. I think even Visual Studio 2015 CTP runs your projects based on the Runtime specified in your path environment variable. For the time being, only beta 3 run times can display in the project property dialog of VS 2015 CTP, but when hitting ctrl + F5, my website starts to load beta 4 runtime and assemblies, I can see the loading in output window, I think this is because I have .k folder prior to the .kre folder in the path environment variable.
Can you try the following?
$cmd-prompt>kpm Install KRE-CLR-x86
It worked for me.

Cygwin & OCaml: OPAM + Batteries

I extensively use Cygwin on a Windows 8 environment (I do not want to go ahead and boot/load Linux directly on the machine). I use the OCamlIDE plug-in for Eclipse and have experienced relatively no problems using this workflow setup.
However, I would like to use Batteries so that I may make use of use of its dynamic arrays among a few other interesting features that will speed up my development process.
I have tried this method: http://ocaml.org/install.html, but I get the following error:
$ sh ./opam_installer.sh /usr/local/bin
No file yet for i686:CYGWIN_NT-6.2-WOW64
What am I missing and how would I configure Cygwin so that it can accept the Opam installer? When I tried yet a different way of building Opam, I got:
'i686-w64-mingw32-gcc' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
as a Makefile error and reason for building failure. It seems something is wrong related to mingw32-gcc, what do I need to install and/or configure for my Cygwin to get it to compile/build things properly. I have wget and curl installed as well.
My overall question: What is the best way to get Batteries installed on my system with the minimum of time spent tracing all of its dependencies by hand? Is there a way I can just build the library module, such as BatDynArray and the includes:
include BatEnum.Enumerable
include BatInterfaces.Mappable
That way I can just call them directly in my code with open...;; and/or include...;;;
OCaml works beautifully on Windows with WODI, which is a Cygwin-based distribution that includes Batteries and tons of other useful packages (which are a pain to install manually on Windows).
I urge you to take a shot at WODI, which I believe to be an indispensable tool for the
rest of us, the forgotten souls, who have to deal with Windows.
First of all, include does not do what you think it does. open Batteries should be exactly what you're looking for. OPAM is not yet solid on windows (maybe Thomas could give an update on where things stand).
Frankly, I would recommend to install a linux on a VM, you should be able to get started with OPAM instantly then. Otherwise, take a look at this package manager for OCaml which focuses on cross platform support: http://yypkg.forge.ocamlcore.org/. I've never tried it myself however. The last package manger you could try is GODI, I'm not sure about its windows support though.
Finally, if none of these options work then it should be possible to install batteries from the source. All you need is OCaml and make. And if there are problems with this approach then you should definitely follow up on them either here or on the bug tracker because batteries does intend to support windows AFAIK.

Install Mono Runtime Locally

Here is my situation. I am on a Mac using Brew as my package manager. I had mono installed on my machine and I was doing all sorts of development in C#. I was doing web development, gui development, ect. When I tried to update my machine using Brew, I got an error. Uninstalling Mono solved the issue.
So, what I did is I toyed around and I created a 2nd user on my machine. Now, this user doesn't need anything to work. I just need Mono and Mono Develop to work on this user without installing anything globally. Everything needs to be installed locally.
So to be specific, I am the only on who uses my machine. My /Users directory looks like this.
/Users/dillon
/Users/dummy
So if I could install mono, in let's say:
/Users/dummy/.mono
Then in my .profile:
export MONO_PATH=/Users/dummy/.mono
Obviously this isn't a perfect world but I was wondering if anyone is an expert on this subject?
(Also, I use this dummy user for other stuff, I use it for Wine and I have a collection of software from school on this user.)
You need to build Mono from source to install it into a custom location (in which case you can install it anywhere you like).
You can install MonoDevelop.app anywhere, but getting it to use your custom Mono is a bit trickier. You might be able to make it work by mucking around with the relevant environment variables though.
How to install Mono in a custom location and the relevant environment variables is all covered here: http://mono-project.com/Parallel_Mono_Environments