"native" installers for jbang

[maxandersen]

not sure why but this morning I ran jpackage --input ~/.jbang/bin --name jbang --main-jar jbang.jar --main-class dev.jbang.Main --type dmg and ended up with a dmg file I could use to get a out-of-the-box installer of jbang...

Whats cool is that it actuall packages up all of ~/.jbang/bin into that installer providing all the needed bits for "distributing" the launch scripts and the jar to user.

Of course running it does not do much because our Main atm is just a console app....but nothing stops us from making a dev.jbang.installer.Main that instead of running jbang....runs the appropriate command to run the installation...

Meaning we could have a way to install jbang without users starting up the terminal as the first thing. Could even have it install vscodium and open up the ide with jbang preconfigured... again without requiring users to go to terminal...

jpackage could also help solve #882 ...

anyhow - not sure what is the right path but just found it interesting exploring if jpackage could help making it even easier for non-terminal folks to get a easy to use java dev environment setup.

wdyt?

[quintesse]

But doesn't that need either Java already installed or Java being made part of the installer package?

[maxandersen]

jpackage does that bundling.

[quintesse]

Ok, but won't that increase the size of the bundle by quite a bit?

[maxandersen]

Sure but it's enclosed and can probably be reduced as we don't needfull jdk to just run install.

It's just for users preferring desktop first rather than terminal first ..

[maxandersen]

just realized another thing these could be used for - handling a jbang:// protocol and make java apps runnable by clicking in a browser.

imagine having jbang://run/<scriptref>&<key=value> to encode launch of a jbang run command - native apps can make that happen.

[maxandersen]

this would be more like a jbang-runner app than jbang itself - so would probably be its own repo like jbang-maven-plugin and not need be released as often as it would just download the right/recent version of jbang needed.

[quintesse]

Ok! That makes more sense.