Provide more and easier installation options (Homebrew, AUR, ...)

[nevrome]

Would it be possible to add a subcommand to trident, which updates trident itself (!) to the latest release version? So basically:

1. Download the latest release executable
2. Determine the path to the executable that is currently run
3. Replace that executable with the new one

Is that technically possible? Would it be possible if did not directly attempt to do 3., but instead only provide the user with the right mv command?

We could call it trident bootstrap (or trident munchhausen 😬)

[stschiff]

Not too easy, because we don't know how the user installed trident. Could be via GitHub, could be via direct download, or perhaps conda... not sure how this could be implemented. At the minimum, however, we can of course provide at least a command which checks whether there is a newer version available?

[stschiff]

which reminds me that I also wanted to make a Homebrew package

[nevrome]

Hm - true. I forgot about all these package managers. Probably it's better to go that route. It would certainly be better to have an installation process for Windows and Mac that works without a ton of workarounds for the user. Arguably much more important than Homebrew is of course the AUR, though 😛

[nevrome]

I now think about this like this: If we don't have enough users, then it's not worth maintaining many different installation options. If we have enough users, then some of them will maintain the necessary Homebrew, AUR, etc. packages themselves.

We already provide everything a power user needs for packaging. And we even maintain one important channel ourselves: bioconda.

So I will set this issue to wontfix now, but keep it around in case the question comes up again.