pack

Repository moved to codeberg.org

import "git.fractalqb.de/fractalqb/pack"

---

Intro

For Go packages it is common and good style to have packages installabel with a simple go get... command. This is supported in a great way by having so many good tools being part of the Go distribution. However sometimes applications might require to be distributed as a binary package with a crafted distribution file-tree – especially when users are not expected to compile the application themselves.

To have a portable way to pack such a distribution one would need a portable runtime for the program that does the packing. So why not write the packing program in Go? Most of the batteries are already included in Go but IMHO they could use a little polishing, i.e. lifting the API abstraction, to make the packing code even more simple. And exactly that's what this package is provided for!

By the way…

There is just a little tool included to create a source file with constants defining the current version of the package. The idea is extraordinary simple: Write down the version parameters in a separate text file, e.g. VERSION, from which not only the Go code can be generated but that also can likely be processed by a lot of other programs too, e.g. shell, makefiles, Python and many others:

major=0
minor=2
bugfix=0
quality="a"

With such a simple file and one go generate directive, e.g. in an application's main.go

package main
…
//go:generate versioner ./VERSION ./version.go
…

a simple go generate will create the file version.go from the file VERSION:

package main

const (
	Major = 0
	Minor = 2
	Bugfix = 0
	Quality = "a"
)

and with this its trivial to let myfancyprogram show you its version like this

myfancyprogram v0.2.0a
Usage: [flags] input output
…

There are also some flags to define a common prefix for the constants, to have automatically increasing build numbers and to generate a timestamp from time.Now().

Install

To get the library for writing your packing program:

go get -u git.fractalqb.de/fractalqb/pack

To get the versioner binary:

go install -u git.fractalqb.de/fractalqb/pack/versioner