help wrinting universal bash script to install

miesnerd

Hello all-

It has become painfully clear to me that while I am able to convert my fellow social scientists and friends to linux, a disconnect exists.

i once made a remastered version of my ubuntu with all sorts of social psych goodies (Referencer, pybibliographer, bibus, pspp, R, Rkward, etc) all in a distro and distributed it to a few who were interested.

However, I use more than 1 distro.

I also love arch/gentoo, etc.

What I'd love to learn is how to write a script that can be executed on any (or at least a debian, arch,and gentoo based) distro and install programs.

All of the programs I'd like to install come from the ubuntu science lists in the sections of statistics, bibliography, and word processing.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuScience

bataspur

I hardly suppose such a script exists till now. However, the idea is exciting - so I shall not be surprised if I am proved wrong and someone has already done this.

shiki

Since every distro is somewhat different, you could only use a bash script (that supposedly runs on any distro), which determines the current distro name, version, and so on. Such things like "it runs on everything" is almost non-existent on linux, so you better not hope too much.

Its possible to write an application what runs on everything IF that install got the necessary libs. Like you write your app in python, everyone can run it IF they got the right version of python... Not easy..

Install.. the universal method is the "./configure .... && make && make install" as you may know it, that *should* work everywhere. But you meant in packages , so yeah.. that is the first part of my post.

(There are many utilities for every distro to modify the default iso, and so on, so you can make your own flavor, thats not the problem.)
So in a nutshell:
(The script shall be written in bash, should detect the distro name, version, and be aware of those stuff, and then install the application in the correct way)

(Of course, all of this are my personal opinion, others should correct me, etc... anyway, good luck.)

miesnerd

Well here's my question:
how do .bin binary install files that you see with proprietary software get around this?
To my knowledge, in the past when I've used a .bin, its not been distro specific, and its been a breeze to get it to work.

Nevertheless, I feel that I could (and would) do a lot of people in my area (and my new linux converts NOT in the social sciences) if I could provide something like this.

Any guidance would be appreciated.
Obviously, it should first and foremost work on ubuntu, since that's what most people use anyways.

miesnerd

Also, as it is pertinent to our conversation, I feel I should point out this project:

http://nixstaller.berlios.de/news.php

Perhaps my social science/statistics experiment should be their guinea pig, as well.