> I however, am not interested in using it due to the NPM aspect
Some people (here and elsewhere) have expressed similar sentiments about NPM. What would be your preferred alternative? Self hosted? Github releases?
Originally I built it to be self hosted, but NPM was just so darned easy to work with and made the process smoother, so I focused on that. NPM is really just a CDN in this context.
If NPM works for you, I’d just stick with it. If I could choose, NPM wouldn’t even be on the list of options I’d consider. Honestly it’s a little weird using NPM, I mean you wouldn’t distribute Java application via CPAN either.
For the Mac: Brew, or just a download from a website.
For Linux: Download from a website or PPAs.
Again if NPM works, just stick with it, even if it weird.
I don't have a horse in this race, but being able to specify a generic target and then having a documented manifest format sounds nice to me?
Then you'd be able to do the ol' "specify base url" and as long as that host answers appropriately it should Just Work ( also doesn't stop you from then having npm configured as the default ); source freedom without blowing up configuration complexity
Publishing on the other hand I don't have easy recs for that don't eventually result in a lot of special-casing; That said, npm, git-compatible, s3-compatible, and ftp-compatible would cover most use cases, I think? Beyond those deployment types, custom deployment needs may well be better suited to pay you for a support contract anyway? )
> specify a generic target and then having a documented manifest format sounds nice to me?
It worked this way in an earlier iteration. I just wanted to make it simpler. I'll probably circle back and re-enable some of the more custom setups.
It does allow to you generate the apps and installers locally, but they are still "connected" to the cloud (NPM) for downloading the actual jar files and performing updates.
Would itch.io be a possibility? There are separate channels where updates are pushed, so you should be able to get a latest version per channel and go from there.
Speaking for myself, I could see this being useful to me if you targeted any kind of S3 target, along with something like Github Releases. Even just outputting the results to a filesystem location would be simple and appease a good chunk of the HN crowd I suspect.
Similar to GP I wouldn't be trusting NPM with this kind of thing. For the convenience factor of it though, you should definitely leave that in place.
No, I'd probably put them in the same category. This is why I suggested a filesystem output. Github is just popular and having something that could add it as a release to a repo would probably improve popularity of the project.
To be fair if your target segment is not privacy focussed HN crowd, think of an alternative option instead of npm release, dont try to replace it tho.
In real world very less people want to go thru the hurdle of seeing things up. HN crowd has been wrong in some huge projects. Take the feedback and implement if it makes sense to your target segment.
Some people (here and elsewhere) have expressed similar sentiments about NPM. What would be your preferred alternative? Self hosted? Github releases?
Originally I built it to be self hosted, but NPM was just so darned easy to work with and made the process smoother, so I focused on that. NPM is really just a CDN in this context.