gx-bin

[whyrusleeping]

gx-bin

[hackergrrl]

This could be done with a gx-bin tool.

We can do this today with plain gx by having e.g. "language": "go" vs "language": "go-bin" in the package.json. (@whyrusleeping and I have discussed using a better word instead of language, like ecosystem or namespace.) The go ecosystem could be all source distributions of Go programs, while maybe go-bin is for binaries. Or maybe even just general win32-bin, linux-x64-bin, etc. ecosystems for binaries, with hooks to install them to your $PATH?

[whyrusleeping]

@jbenet I definitely want this to be within the scope of what gx can do. @noffle is right about how we want to do it too, we should have the language (yeah, better phrase is needed) be set to 'binary' or something like that, and have extra information in the package so that gx is able to find the correct binary. I'm thinking that if you type gx install -g <package ref/name> it pulls down that ref, which is a meta-package for the binary youre wanting to install. It should have common deps that the binary may need, and then in its package.json, have links to binaries for each specific operating system/arch.

having a gx-bin or gx-dist subtool like you suggest would work great. I'll start thinking/writing about how that would work.

[jbenet]

I'm thinking that if you type gx install -g <package ref/name> it pulls down that ref, which is a meta-package for the binary youre wanting to install. It should have common deps that the binary may need, and then in its package.json, have links to binaries for each specific operating system/arch.

yeah this sounds right to me.

it may be advisable for us to study both pacman and nix in detail to learn what we can.

[whyrusleeping]

i'm quite familiar with pacman (a decade of arch linux for me!) , i'll try installing nix and playing around with it.

The hard choices come down to: where do we want to install things to? The system paths? or our own paths (or better, install to our own paths and symlink into the system paths)

[whyrusleeping]

Now my question is, should we have a single gx-bin that knows how to install on every platform? Or do we have a gx-$PLATFORM tool for each that knows how to install just its target

[jbenet]

• 👍 for downloading into our own paths ($prefix/ipfs/$hash/thing)
• ideally we could download into the same place (or same "layout") cross platform
• symlink in will likely have to be platform-specific, and even configurable. (could have a $binpath option to set)