I am evaluating Cross Platform Installers and I have a general question about them. Suppose you want to create a Cross Platform Installer that works on both Windows and Linux, for example. Well, it seems to me that the files you would copy to a Windows system to run your software would be very different than the files you would copy to a Linux system. On Windows they would be .exe and .dll files, probably, and on Linux they would be .a, .so, .bin and such files. Also, if your product is developed to run on both systems it probably has a build process that builds the system differently depending on which system it is building for. So, my question is, if I am running InstallAnywhere on my Windows System how do I specify what files to copy for a Linux system? Chances are those files are on some remote Linux system, so how can InstallAnywhere get to them? It seems to me that if I have to run InstallAnywhere on both systems to generate the proper files, then that defeats the whole purpose of a "Cross Platform" installer? Anyway, any insight anyone out there has for me would be greatly appreciated.
This is precisely my case, and well there is no magic in here: indeed, you need to build your platform specific components on remote Linux / Unix servers, but when it comes to create the multiplatform installers, you need to have those components copied on the machine where the IA is installed.
