Handling native dependencies

[mipastgt]

After reading all the documentation it is still not clear to me whether jdeploy can handle native dependencies. I have several jar files in my project which contain native shared libraries for one particular platform. E.g. something like mylib-macos-x64.jar. Putting all this into one large uber-jar would make it extremely big. Also my build framework already creates a platform specific uber-jar which works and I would just like to use that with jdeploy. Is that possible and if yes how?

[Birdasaur]

THIs sounds very much like one of my use cases that i want to consider jDEploy to. (nasa worldwind app that has native jogl jars etc)
BUmping this and would love if someone whom knows more about jdeploy could shed some light on it.

[shannah]

Also I can only build the app on my OS (which happens to be Windows) and I have to rely on others to build it for Mac and Linux.

Can you build the jar files for those platforms on Windows, or do you also need to be using Mac/Linux for that?

[shannah]

If you're willing to be a guinea pig I can have a poc ready to do separate bundles by platform by next week.

Do you plan to distribute by npm or github releases?

[mipastgt]

In the end I would like to host the installers myself but for initial testing npm might also be ok. My free GitHub account may be a bit too space limited.

[shannah]

Github has no space limits on releases even for free accounts. Other than the 2gb per file, which shouldn't be an issue.

I would like to add self hosting support but it hasn't reached top priority yet, as there isn't a clear use case for it that adds any advantages over using npm or github.

The primary reason to use github releases would be to integrate into github actions. Eg you can do things like distribute a version that stays in sync with a specific branch.

[mipastgt]

Then we can also use GitHub releases if you can provide me with some description of the setup.

[mipastgt]

I agree with what @Birdasaur said. I'd also prefer to be able to create separate artifacts for each platform. I'm primarily interested in Jetbrains Compose Multiplatform desktop apps and the built-in builder already has this structure. If you need an example project for that you can just generate one with a button click here: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/kotlin-multiplatform-dev/compose-multiplatform-create-first-app.html#create-a-project-using-the-wizard

@Birdasaur for the OS problem you mentioned above I just use GitHub actions. I build locally on a Mac and build the Windows and Linux variants via a GitHub action on their provided runners, using their free plan.

[shannah]

@mipastgt Do compose multiplatform desktop apps contain a lot of heavy native libs that benefit from creating separate targeted bundles for each platform (win/mac/linux), or do you generally distribute the same jars to every platform?

[mipastgt]

Oh yes. They contain by default the native Skia library which is several MB and they are bundled with the platform JRE.