Concept: what is bundle?

[yuhr]

I've noticed some design inconsistency between platforms while implementing #12. As mentioned in #92, it makes sense to having some option to generate not an installer but just a bundle, but then we need some clarification for the term "bundle". I think current implementation is like below:

Platform	What it's called	Can be run directly?
Windows	installer	need to be installed by itself
macOS	bundle	can be run directly, portable but can be installed by user
Debian	package	need to be installed by package manager

I think installing stuff is a little out of scope of cargo bundle subcommand and our primary business is just wrapping up essential files needed to run the application. Installers and packages are just to place these files onto specific directory and/or register the app to the "Installed Applications" list of user's OS. Ofcourse it would be great if cargo becomes capable of such stuff by using cargo-bundle though, it's a secondary or subsequent step.

There may be multiple steps in bundling process:

0. Build: already done by cargo build
1. Collect: copy the executable and the required resources to a separate directory
2. Sign (optional): codesign in platform-specific way, e.g. using rust-codesign
3. Pack (optional): generate installer or package, and sign it too if 2 is enabled
4. Deploy (optional but requires 2 and 3): upload to app store or similar, maybe out of scope

When a user runs cargo bundle, we just have to do upto 1. On macOS, this results in generating an *.app bundle, while others are just a bare directory containing an executable and resources. (But another concern is, we may have cargo bundle --bare option for macOS users who want just a bare directory)

Though, this is just a rough idea... Could someone advise?

[parasyte]

This is a good question. macOS has a concept of packages (.pkg files) that are similar to Debian packages or MSI installers. I don't have any great resources that describe the format, but there are several tools available for creating and extracting them.

Another example is disk images (.dmg files) on macOS which is the common way to distribute App bundles.