gianluca-nitti / nw.js-global-install Goto Github PK

On Ubuntu, generated .deb packages can be correctly installed using dpkg from command line, or the gdebi GUI frontend. However, by default Ubuntu tries to open .deb files with Ubuntu Software Center, which fails to correctly install packages generated by nw-global-build correctly because the postinstall scripts runs nwjsmanager, which is a GUI application. Ubuntu Software Center uses AptDaemon to install the packages, and a GUI can't be opened from a daemon. Years ago this was reported as a bug in AptDaemon. A possible solution could be to add an headless (non-gui) mode to nwjsmanager, but then the user installing from Ubuntu Software Center won't have any way to know the progress of the download.

So if a package is installed using Ubuntu Software Center, the installation of the correct nw.js binaries fails and it is retried at the first startup of the application; it then fails again because the user isn't root and thus can't write to /usr/lib/nwjs.

Actually the NSIS-based Windows installer generated by the cli tool is reported as untrusted application by Windows SmartScreen. The attached screenshot (it's in Italian because it's my main language and so my Windows language too) is shown when opening the installer for the example application, that can be downloaded from here. Basically, it says that Windows SmartScreen is preventing the application to execute because it comes from an unknown source. The user is still allowed to run the installer, but this may be not very user-friendly.