Provide prebuilt distro packages

I’m creating this issue following a discussion with @astorije and the handling of daemon management. The problem we’d want to solve is that for the end user, it’s not very clear how to install The Lounge, how to run it, etc. Right now everyone has their way, and many of them are wrong and/or incomplete and/or impractical. Adding support for automatically daemonizing would fix one of the problem as the client would just fork in the background, but that still doesn’t deal with starting back up on boot or on crash. Other projects don’t really ship those either, they just have the luxury of being supported by the distro maintainers and being part of the main repos. Many tools and utilities people are used to are, in fact, provided by the distro. Everything one can manage with service XXXX restart or /etc/init.d/XXXX restart is in fact provided by the packagers for that particular distro.

Thus, I suggest we create a bunch of extra repos, one for each package format we want to deal with, and manage those. I can take care of that and automate the builds on my server, and also take input from the community to improve those packages. Those would be:

• arch-lounge (for Arch, Antergos and Manjaro) (which I already maintain here but would move to the org)
• deb-lounge (for Ubuntu, Mint and Debian)
• rpm-lounge (for CentOS, Fedora and others)

(I would personally do lounge-xxx as I think it makes more sense, but we have docker-lounge already so ¯_(ツ)_/¯)

This way, our users could just download the .deb on their Ubuntu boxes, run service thelounge start and be done. Configure in /etc/thelounge/config.js. Everything would run smoothly exactly like nginx, mysql or other daemons work.

Thoughts?

[AlMcKinlay]

I’ll just leave this here

Developers from multiple Linux distributions and companies today announced collaboration on the “snap” universal Linux package format, enabling a single binary package to work perfectly and securely on any Linux desktop, server, cloud or device.

Snaps now work natively on Arch, Debian, Fedora, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Unity, and Xubuntu. They are currently being validated on CentOS, Elementary, Gentoo, Mint, OpenSUSE, OpenWrt and RHEL, and are easy to enable on other Linux distributions.

[astorije]

Let’s close this one, re-open if necessary.

As for rpm, if no one in the maintainers team is actually using it, it’s harder to keep something properly documented, fully supported, etc. I don’t recall people asking for an rpm, so let’s see if it becomes highly-wanted and if someone from the community is ready to step up and officially maintain an rpm (just like @williamboman is doing for Docker and @maxpoulin64 is doing for Arch and Debian/Ubuntu).