Installers for all platforms

[holandes22]

At first, we can simple distribute the packages in zip or tar.gz format. But would be nice
to have at a later stage installers that have specific platform behavior.

Installer should

• Add shortcut link
  • In windows to the menu
  • On Linux add a launcher (check this work for all the desktop envs)
  • On Mac not sure what is best practice - investigate
• Distribution
  • Use deb, RPM and snap packages for Linux
    • Optionally we can have repositories for some of the main distros (Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch - this will require package maintainers)
  • For Windows provide an msi installer
  • For Mac investigate what is the best way to distribute installers
• auto-update support
  • For Mac an Windows. This requires having a Squirrel service to broadcast new updates
  • For Linux these should be handled via distro package manager

electron libs that can help with this

The best choice seems to be https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-builder

These also look good
- https://github.com/Aluxian/electron-superkit
- windows installer https://github.com/electron/grunt-electron-installer
- for macosx https://github.com/LinusU/node-appdmg or https://github.com/electron/grunt-electron-installer

[holandes22]

Status update: I haven't got much time to work on this and my bandwidth during August is null. Will retake this at the beginning of September, if anyone else tackles it first.

[holandes22]

Status update: The most viable project to help build packages for distribution seems to be electron-builder. It supports all the features we want, is actively developed and well documented.

I've been researching and playing with electron-builder and it turns out that is quite a task to take on.

• Making it work with ember-electron requires work. see this (ticket)[https://github.com/Use electron-builder under the hood instead of electron-packager adopted-ember-addons/ember-electron#62]
• Wasn't able to make it work directly (without using ember-electron for the packaging stage)

As a side note, making Linux packages is much doable in short time as we can use an universal package such as Snap or Flatpak based on the current package (tar.gz). But that would mean the platforms won't have feature parity regarding installer (which I don't like)

Luckily, the team at ember-electron seems to be maknig progress towards a better
packaging solution, see comments at adopted-ember-addons/ember-electron#62 and this PR adopted-ember-addons/ember-electron#129 I think this will pave the way for an installer. Regardless, we would still need to deal with:

• auto-updater (requires an update server https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-builder#auto-update)
• Signing code
  • Windows: Need to purchase a code signing cert
  • Mac: Distributing outside of Mac store apparently requires an Apple developer ID to be able to sign the code

[holandes22]

This should be made possible by upgrading to ember-electron v2.x which adds a make command (powered by electron-forge) which can create installer for all the supported platforms. See https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-forge#possible-make-targets

Therefore this is now blocked by #49