Re: Installation script for Linux.

[Tor Lillqvist <tml iki fi>]

Magnus Myrefors writes:
 > What I want to make is a scriptfile that installs an already built
 > binarie with an icon (if it is possible) and a .jpg-file that is
 > fetched by the program when it starts. A tar-file seems to be the
 > right choice.

I wonder why you think so, normal packages for the distributions you
intend to support seem to be a obvious choice to me ;)

Please note that even if you just provide a .deb or a .rpm package,
users of "other" distributions can often manage to install it anyway
using some tool to install "foreign" packages.

 > I wonder though, if my executable is built with the newest version
 > of GTK+-2.0, does it work on a linux-system with an older version
 > of GTK+2.0 installed ?

Nope. GTK+ provides only backward compatibility, not forward
compatibility. (See Wikipedia for a description of these terms.) You
should build your software against the oldest versions of libraries
that you expect people will want to run the executables against. This
applies not only to GTK+ and its immediate dependencies Pango, cairo,
atk and GLib, but also to glibc as far as I know.

If you provide your software as proper RPM or deb packages, you should
make sure the packages are built to include the version dependencies.

 > I have seen when I have installed other software that the
 > configuration-script checks which version of a certain file that is
 > installed, but I think that was when I built from source-files.

Yes, you are thinking of checks done at build time here.

--tml