Bug#200151: RFP: makeself -- small shell script that generates a self-extractible tar.gz archive
Package: wnpp
Version: N/A; reported 2003-07-05
Severity: wishlist
* Package name : makeself
Version : 2.1
Upstream Author : Stéphane Peter <megastep@megastep.org>
* URL : http://www.megastep.org/makeself/
* License : GPL
Description : generates self-extractible .tar.gz archive
>From the home page:
makeself.sh is a small shell script that generates a self-extractible tar.gz
archive from a directory. The resulting file appears as a shell script
(many of those have a .run suffix), and can be launched as is. The
archive will then uncompress itself to a temporary directory and an
optional arbitrary command will be executed (for example an installation
script). This is pretty similar to archives generated with WinZip
Self-Extractor in the Windows world. Makeself archives also include
checksums for integrity self-validation (CRC and/or MD5 checksums).
The makeself.sh script itself is used only to create the archives from a
directory of files. The resultant archive is actually a compressed
(using gzip, bzip2, or compress) TAR archive, with a small shell script
stub at the beginning. This small stub performs all the steps of
extracting the files, running the embedded command, and removing the
temporary files when it's all over. All what the user has to do to
install the software contained in such an archive is to "run" the
archive, i.e sh nice-software.run. I recommend using the "run" (which
was introduced by some Makeself archives released by Loki Software) or
"sh" suffix for such archives not to confuse the users, since they it's
actually shell scripts (with quite a lot of binary data attached to it
though!).
Reply to: