Telodendria/man/man7/package.7

.Dd $Mdocdate: November 20 2022 $
.Dt PACKAGE 7
.Os Telodendria Project
.Sh NAME
.Nm package
.Nd Some guidelines for packaging Telodendria for your system.
.Sh DESCRIPTION
.Pp
Telodendria is distributed at source code, and does not offer a convenient
install process. This is intentional; the Telodendria project is primarily
concerned with developing Telodendria itself, not packaging it for the
hundreds of different operating systems and Linux distributions that exist.
It is my firm belief that distributing an open source project is not the
job of the open source developer; that's the reason software distributions
exist, to collect and distribute software.
.Pp
It would be impossible to package Telodendria for every platform, because
each platform has very different expectations for software. Even different
Linux distributions have different conventions for where manual pages,
binaries, and configuration files go.
.Pp
That being said, this page aims to assist those who want to package
Telodendria, or just install it from source, though that's not recommended.
.Pp
See
.Xr td 8
for instructions on how to build Telodendria. Only proceed with packaging
Telodendria after you have successfully built it on your operating system.
.Pp
To package Telodendria, you should collect the following files, and figure
out where they should be installed for your system:
.Bl -bullet
.It
The telodendria server binary itself:
.Pa build/telodendria
.It
All manual pages in the
.Pa man/
directory that are prefixed with "telodendria". These are the user documentation
pages. All pages that do not have the "telodendria" prefix are intended only
for developers, and so do not need to be installed to the system.
.It
An init script. People that wish to install Telodendria to their system
expect it to be integrated enough that Telodendria can be easily started at
boot, and otherwise managed by the system's daemon tools, be it systemd, or
another init system. Consult your system's documentation for writing an
init script. Do note that Telodendria does not fork itself to the background;
the init script should do that. Also note that Telodendria responds to SIGINT,
so a SIGINT should be sent to stop Telodendria instead of a SIGTERM or SIGKILL.
.It
A sample
.Pa telodendria.conf
file. Whether this file is placed at the actual configuration file location,
or a directory containing configuration file samples is entirely up to the
packager. You can use or adapt any of the configuration files in
.Pa contrib/ ,
or write your own specifically for your package.
.El
.Pp
Once you have collected the files that need to be installed, make sure your
package performs the following tasks on install:
.Bl -bullet
.It
If necessary, depending on the config used, create a new system user for
the Telodendria daemon to run as.
.It
If conventional for your system, enable the Telodendria init script so
that Telodendria is started on system boot.
.It
Insruct the user to carefully read the sample
.Pa telodendria.conf
as well as the
.Xr telodendria.conf 5
manual page before starting Telodendria.
.El
.Pp
The goal of a package should be to get everything as ready-to-run as possible.
The user should only have to change one or two default options in the configuration
file before Telodendria can be started.
.Pp
Remember to publicly document the setup of Telodendria on your platform so
that users can easily get Telodendria running. If you're packaging Telodendria
for a containerization system such as Docker, you can omit the things that
containers typically do not have, such as the init script and man pages.
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr telodendria-contributing 7 ,
.Xr td 8 ,
.Xr telodendria 7