What does HackerNews think of packr?

> Even if they stick with Java and try to learn jpackage they quickly realize they need Windows, and a Mac, and maybe Linux just to make packages that their friends can run at all

And when they test it on Windows they'll realize that the launcher that jpackage creates does something weird on startup (possibly involving relaunching itself? [1]) that makes Windows display a busy cursor for a while after the program has launched, so they'll have to forget about jpackage and redo it all with something like Packr [2] and Wix# [3]...

[1] https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/fe45835f7cebfccd4544ae19...

[2] https://github.com/libgdx/packr

[3] https://github.com/oleg-shilo/wixsharp

You can replace it with separate components:

* Run jlink manually (or scripted) to create the bundled runtime.

* Create launcher executables with packr[1].

* Create the installer using whatever tools people normally use for native applications. NSIS[2] and WiX[3] are widely used. (I haven't gotten to this step yet myself.)

[1] https://github.com/libgdx/packr

[2] http://nsis.sourceforge.net/

[3] http://wixtoolset.org/

Generally java desktop software is wrapped together with a bundled jre and behaves like an executable without external dependencies. There are a bunch of ways to do this. For example: https://github.com/libgdx/packr

In general, one of the challenges of delivering commercial software is dealing with the various ecosystems of your customers. Customers may have different versions of Java installed or none at all. Avian allows one to bundle everything required to run a Java application into a single executable and simplifies the problem such that many of the unknowns related to delivering the Java application disappear.

Also, keep in mind that Avian predates at least some of the other solutions to this problem. You could use something like https://github.com/libgdx/packr as well.

Interesting this approach of building single binary containers.

I think that would be like packr [1] for Java, already discussed here [2]. I wonder if there is something like this for other languages/platforms like python/ruby/node.

[1] https://github.com/libgdx/packr

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7696564

For those who can accept ant+ivy, I feel this is a stab in the right direction for console apps: https://github.com/djeikyb/simple-console-app

The script target creates a runnable shell script that has the jar and all dependencies embedded. The last step might be using packr[0] to also embed the java runtime.

[0]: https://github.com/libgdx/packr