What platform do you use when developing for Dialog?
Currently, dgt is OS X only, but it may be possible to get Linux support working (it’s more about figuring out Linux package managers than about the code); Windows support would be a stretch.
Howard, for the majority of Linux users the best package manager is the source tarball…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
That’s available from GitHub, i.e.,
The brew formula adds some dependencies needed by dgt, such as Babashka and Clojure:
depends_on "vickio/dialog/dialog-if"
depends_on "hlship/brew/aamachine"
depends_on "borkdude/brew/babashka"
depends_on "imagemagick"
Honestly at this point I find apt a lot easier than ./configure in terms of pulling in dependencies automatically. I get the benefits of building from source, but nowadays dependencies are complicated enough that e.g. building the Inform 7 IDE from source is multiple days’ undertaking as I search for dependency names on Github and try to decide which fork of each to use. Meanwhile installing a .deb takes seconds.
Tarballs aren’t really packages, much less package managers, and in general, I’d say the best package manager is whichever your chosen distro uses by default since I get the impression mixing package formats on the same system is more trouble than its worth.
That said, I’ve stuck to debian-derived systems and the apt package manager ever since I freed myself from Microsoft’s shackles ~19 years ago and I confess, one reason I’m reluctant to try the likes of Arch or Fedora is that such a switch would require learning a new package manager and that I’ve never been able to get a straight answer as to whether an equivalent to Aptitude exists for other package managers. And in case you don’t know, Aptitude is a frontend to apt that allows for easy viewing of all installed packages, all available packages, information about each package, etc. built with ncurses.
Also, I’ve never been comfortable compiling from source, at least other people’s code. I can run g++ on my own tiny programs, but hand me a tarball or git repository, and I’m lost if there isn’t something like an install.sh or setup.sh to automate the process.
I like just selecting packages from a list and all dependencies are automatically pulled in.
Prepackaging software for multiple distros does sound like a total pain in the anatomy though, especially since, even within the same distro family, available versions of dependencies can vary so wildly it’s impossible to make a package that’s compatible with even two closely related distros(I run debian, but ubuntu is a more popular target for stand alone .deb files in my experience, and it’s about 50/50 whether I can get an ubuntu .deb to work on my Debian system. And I’m using Debian Testing, I suspect the ods would be lower with Debian stable given it’s tendency to be outdated compared to the latest Ubuntu).
No comment on dialog as I don’t know the first thing about that language.
Packages/managers assist with dependencies. Tarballs don’t.
It’s a good way to subtly (or not so subtly) break your system.
lol, jeffrey & mike, seems that you have missed the point 
What I mean is that not few Linux users often compile from scratch the source, caring by hand with the dependencies 
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
So, if I was going to try and release dialog-tool for Linux, what would that look like? How could I test it? Maybe using Docker, but I know zero about creating releases or whatever for Linux. If it wasn’t for Homebrew (which I’ve heard can work on Linux?) I wouldn’t even be able to release this properly for OS X.
Debian source packages allow building from source while still having the benefit of dependency management through packages. Generic tarballs fall short of this, which is why Debian requires more.