Evaluate options for downloadable binaries

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As a convenience for end users, we may wish to provide downloadable binaries, 
packages, and/or installers for Windows, OsX, and Linux. Some options are 
listed below for how we might approach this. The simplest options to implement 
are listed first.

1. Rely on users to install a JDK themselves, and provide instructions on how 
to compile and run the Java programs.

2. Rely on users to install a JRE themselves. Provide a pre-compiled executable 
.jar file, along with instructions on how to run it with the java command. 
(Possibly we would need to provide separate precompiled .jar files for each CPU 
architecture, of which the 32-bit and 64-bit Intel architectures would be most 
important.)

3. Evaluate cross-platform installer generators such as IzPack, to see if they 
would enable us to generate installers for each of the major platforms. (My 
limited testing indicates that IzPack does not yet support Windows 8.1., on 
which basis I'd rule it out.)

4. Follow a platform-specific approach similar to Minecraft 
(https://minecraft.net/download), namely:

4.a. For Windows, provide 32-bit and 64-bit MSI installers.*

4.b. For OsX, provide a .dmg disk image file.

4.c  For Linux, provide an executable .jar file

5. Same as option 4 above, except that for Linux we would provide .deb and .rpm 
packages. Packages in .deb format can be installed with the dpkg command 
Debian, Ubuntu and other Debian based distributions. Packages in .rpm format 
can be installed with the rpm command in Red Hat Enterprise, Fedora, SuSE and 
many other Linux distributions.

* Option 4.a above may imply that for Windows the MSI installer would install 
Ponomar as an executable .exe file. The .exe file in turn would wrap an 
executable .jar file, and provide a wizard to assist the user in downloading 
and installing a JRE as needed. To create the .exe file, we would have to use a 
tool like launch4j.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by [email protected] on 6 Feb 2015 at 4:46