Autopackage GNOME Launch Box Tutorial

Integrating the package with your website

Building a package is not enough. The user must be able to easily find it, and understand what to do with it. That's what this section is about.

A very common problem with the websites of open source projects is "bloated download page syndrome". Many programs will have a source tarball, packages for various versions of various Linux distros, maybe a Windows installer, maybe a MacOS package ... by the time all these are listed on the page, the user is faced with overwhelming choice. The worst thing you can do is link directly to a SourceForge style generic downloads listing. Not only is there a lot of irrelevant noise and advertising on these pages, but the user is given no assistance as to which download to pick.

There are several different approaches for solving this problem.

1. Intelligently group downloads
2. Use browser user-agent sniffing to show only relevant downloads to the user
3. Only provide a few packages from the website. For instance, you could say that you will host a Windows installer, a MacOS X DMG and a Linux autopackage, but any other packages (for specific distros, or specialist builds) must be hosted offsite or on a different page.

Here's an example of intelligently grouping downloads:

Another way is to use some simple JavaScript to detect which distribution the user is running, and only present the downloads that are relevant for them. We hope to shortly launch a new service to the open source community that makes this easy: you will be able to add a script tag pointing to a file on our site, and along with some simple annotated HTML have an automatically generated, context-sensitive downloads page.

Finally, please link to our installation instructions page instead of writing your own instructions for installing autopackages. Thank you. :)

Autopackage GNOME Launch Box Tutorial