FWD » Core Development » Runtime Infrastructure

We have found that our development environment is not the easiest for developers to implement on Windows-based systems. And our testing for such environments is not extensive, since we use Ubuntu extensively. We have had many customers struggle with trying to just get FWD built. And those are just the ones that have contacted us for help. The number of people seeing issues is certainly much higher than we know.

It makes no sense to force them to go through an extra process and extra complications before they can even try FWD out. The solution is to deliver a pre-built binary distribution of each release. This should be manually downloadable (in our Downloads section) AND it probably should be something that can be pulled by gradle or maven. We already provide customized versions of 3rd party libraries in https://proj.goldencode.com/artifacts/ and it seems this is a good option as well.

Another option is to implement a real .deb package (and possibly a PPA too). This may also in fact be a good idea, but we can consider that under the category of "installer" (which will be a separate task).