Preface

Purpose of This Guide

The Developer's Guide to Application Packaging describes how to prepare your software for distribution on CD-ROM. This guide does not cover application design, user interface design, retrieval software, or multimedia. You should have completed coding and testing your software before you begin work on package creation.

Audience

This guide is for developers who are writing applications intended to run under Solaris^(R) system software.

Organization of this Guide

This guide is organized as follows:

Chapter 1, "Distributing Software on CD-ROM," describes the tasks required to put your software on CD-ROM for distribution.

Chapter 2, "Application Packaging," describes the application packaging tools.

Chapter 3, "Installing and Checking Packages," describes the tools for verifying that a package has been installed correctly.

Chapter 4, "Creating Icons and Package Clusters," describes how to use clusters and meta-clusters when packaging software.

Appendix A, "Packaging Guidelines," describes the application packaging guidelines to be followed when creating software packages.

Appendix B, "Packaging Case Studies," provides several examples of creating application packages.

For More Information

For background information on packaging, refer to:

• System V Application Binary Interface (UNIX Press)
• SPARC systems: System V Application Binary Interface SPARC^(TM) Processor Supplement (UNIX Press)
• x86 systems: System V Application Binary Interface Intel386 Processor Supplement

What Typographic Changes and Symbols Mean

The following table describes the type changes and symbols used in this book.

Table P-1

Typeface or Symbol	Meaning	Example
AaBbCc123	The names of commands, files, and directories; on-screen computer output	Edit your .login file. Use ls -a to list all files. system% You have mail.
AaBbCc123	What you type, contrasted with on-screen computer output	system%su Password::
AaBbCc123	Command-line placeholder: replace with a real name or value	To delete a file, type rm filename.
AaBbCc123	Book titles, new words or terms, or words to be emphasized	Read Chapter 6 in User's Guide. These are called class options. You must be root to do this.
Code samples are included in boxes and may display the following:
%	UNIX C shell prompt	system%
$	UNIX Bourne and Korn shell prompt	system$
#	Superuser prompt, all shells	system#

Manual Page References

When commands are mentioned in the text for the first time, a reference to the command's manual page is included in parentheses: command(section). The numbered sections are located in the Solaris 2.5 Reference Manual AnswerBook.

Information in the Examples

The examples in this guide match what you see on the screen as closely as possible. However, your system may have a different configuration or be running a different release of the SunOS operating system.

Complete code samples should compile and work as represented. Code fragments, while not compiled, reflect high standards of coding accuracy.