jMonkeyEngine
Migrate from NBI to nbpackage
As per this message in the Netbeans Dev Mailing List, the old Netbeans Installer (NBI) method of packaging Netbeans Platform Applications is essentially deprecated.
We should look to migrate building the jMonkeyEngine SDK installers using the nbpackage utility instead.
This looks relatively straightforward in principle, just need to create the config files and build images with the appropriate tooling (Wine, Swift et al) on which to build and package the .zip file.
The tricky parts will be:
- Documentation is pretty sparse ATM
- The jMonkeyEngine SDK has a custom step/screen in the installer - not sure how to do this yet
This may be a good first step towards converting the SDK to Maven, as the NBI creating in the Netbeans Maven plugin was also not documented super-well (I hadn't figured out how to add the custom screen to the installer...).
The good parts are it should make bundling a JDK easier, as well as potentially solve issues with the installers being trusted/signed on Windows & MacOS
Here is the Netbeans Community Installers repo with all their configs to ~rip off~ be inspired by...
It just occurred to me that the additional installation step/screen we had was for the bundled Blender? And that is gone now? So we should be golden :+1:
Looks like Wine is not available on Github runner images, but actual Windows is. So maybe build the ZIP release as so far and Mac & Linux installers from that. Then switch over to Windows runner to build the Windows installer from the ZIP.. I understood that the binary ZIP can be used as the base for building and Wine is required for building InnoSetup Windows installer.
I would leave Maven out of the picture for now and just concentrate on the installer with this ticket. There is plenty to chew already. And as far as I understand, going with Netbeans 26, using NBI is a no go (or at least no guarantees it'll work).