Just A Programmer We’re Just Programmers…

Yes your software needs an installer.

Some people have a love-hate releationship with certain pieces of software. Others, a love to hate relationship. My releationship with Eclipse is more of a respect-hate relationship.

Perhaps I make that categorization, because I cannot admit a more purer dichotomy of love-hate, I’ve often described eclipse as being put together by a hippie commune of developers. The features are all nice. However, the complete lack of central planning is very apparent. The fact that there are at least three “Find” dialogs in Eclipse PDT, the Eclipse distribution designed for PHP is testament to this. In the Edit menu their is a find dialog for the current document. In the Search menu there is one dialog for searching for PHP methods, fields, etc. There is also a second that has several tabs for searching for javascript, plain file search, and others.

This is all somewhat acceptable, as Eclipse not only an IDE, but a Framework for making IDEs. There are third party eclipse distributions for editing java, PHP and other languages in eclipse that are more polished. Perhaps its best that the “reference distributions” have the full hodgepodge of features, and third parties take the “less is more” approach.

However, one missing feature I cannot forgive is the lack of an installer. All mature software projects should have proper installers for their platform. For an Apple, this means a .dmg file with a .app bundle built in. For windows this means an MSI, exe, or an exe wrapped around an MSI. For linux this means an rpm and debian package.

That’s not to say I am against the concept of a binary zip or tarball. On the contrary, some people don’t like installers, and they should have the option of just unzipping. Freedom of choice is a good thing. However, I am saying that an installer is one of the necessary choices for all platforms.

As a final aside, I realize that a dmg with a .app bundle is not really an installer on par with an RPM, MSI, or EXE installer. I also realize there are real installers for MacOSX software that a minority of Mac Software uses.  So I acknowledge that Mac OSX is an exception to this rule.