Distribute releases as .deb and .msi

[bjornregnell]

Expectation

There are not yet any links to packages under "Other resources" on
https://www.scala-lang.org/download/ for deb and msi to the new awesome Scala 3.0.0

It would be good to know how the naming standard of the links will be when it is eventually up; direct links are published from elsewhere, e.g. in coming course material etc.

Will it be something like this?
https://downloads.lightbend.com/scala/3.0.0/scala-3.0.0.deb

[bjornregnell]

A reason I'm asking is that I need to give links to deb packages to our sysadmin of our university computers that will be upgraded soon.

[SethTisue]

(It won't be lightbend.com, but I don't know if it's been otherwise discussed.)

[smarter]

There's no process in place currently for generating .deb, the released artifacts are at https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/releases and only includes tarballs currently. I assume our sbt-assembly settings could be tweaked to also generate .debs but we need someone to investigate that.

[bjornregnell]

I guess deb and msi would be good as probably quite a few have gotten used to rely on them over the years and it might be good to reduce the gap between scala2 and scala3. I know our sysadmins prefer .deb over .tar.gz, but if deb don't exist they'll have to manually place the stuff in the file system, which is also doable but more work. (We have a lot of strange stuff installed on our student lab computer's linux installations...)

So, the download link is currently https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/releases/download/3.0.0/scala3-3.0.0.tar.gz
@smarter Can we rely on that the link will have the same form for 3.x.y for the foreseable future as in
https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/releases/download/3.x.y/scala3-3.x.y.tar.gz
with scala3 (and not just scala). And will the dotty part of the url be kept or will it be called scala (or scala3) instead?

[smarter]

I think this link format should keep working yeah, even if we rename the repo it should become a redirect.

[bjornregnell]

ok thanks @smarter good to now.

It seems as sbt-native-packager can do deb-packaging with some settings ceremony and installing some linux stuff like dpkg-deb etc:
https://github.com/sbt/sbt-native-packager
https://www.scala-sbt.org/sbt-native-packager/formats/debian.html

[bjornregnell]

@SethTisue How is Scala 2 packages deb msi build currently? Is that process easy to more or less copy-paste for Scala 3?

[SethTisue]

How is Scala 2 packages deb msi build currently? Is that process easy to more or less copy-paste for Scala 3?

all that stuff is over in https://github.com/scala/scala-dist (and https://github.com/scala/scala-dist-smoketest). it uses (a now probably rather outdated) version of sbt-native-packager

scala-dist has been largely untouched for some years now, and I was never super familiar with it in the first place (since we've barely needed to touch it since Scala 2.11 days), so I'm not really sure what the difficulty level would be of adapting it to Scala 3, but offhand I wouldn't expect there to be any fundamental barrier. most of the actual functionality comes from sbt-native-packager.

[bjornregnell]

Thanks for pointers. I had a look and there is some complexity in it above my head, but I guess much of that is due to docker and CI and platform specific stuff. Perhaps the actual packages are easy to generate, but it seems as if one VM is needed per platform etc.

[bjornregnell]

@smarter Since 22 days ago winget has support for 2.13.5. I guess msi-packaging is needed for winget to support also Scala 3. So solving this issue would also help windows user that opt in for the new windows package manager (I guess quite a few of my students on windows will want that). Is there any progress or plans for this?
https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs/tree/master/manifests/s/Scala/scala
https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs/blob/master/manifests/s/Scala/scala/2.13.5/Scala.scala.yaml
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/package/manifest?tabs=minschema%2Cversion-example