Hi avsej! If you're talking about generating an installation tarball for Nim, the koch tool should be able to generate a csources directory with ./koch csource; you can then tar it up.
I think that you would need to use the niminst tool directly and write an ini file if you wanted to do something similar for your own project. (This is just my best effort after poking around for 20 minutes, though, so someone else who knows more may have a better answer).
Edit: Looks like there's also the targz command with koch, but this is not working on my system because it's failing to build the Windows platform.
Thank you.
In general I was asking how those particular archives from 'Downloads' page actually built. From your reply it seems like they crafted somewhat manually? I was expecting some script used for releasing like build.sh or install.sh
And there is no such command for ./koch on devel branch.
You first need to build koch with nim cc koch.nim in the Nim root directory.
In the second step, you can build the csources with ./koch csource -d:release. If you do not need the CAAS features and want a slightly smaller footprint, use ./koch csource -d:release -d:nocaas. This generates the code that allows the Nim compiler to be built across a number of operating systems and compilers.
In the third step, use ./koch zip. This will package the generated C sources and all other files in the distribution. It will generate a zip file in build/nim-x.y.z.zip (with appropriate values for x, y, and z). You can either use this zip file directly or repackage it using a different archiver. Note that the ./koch targz command currently also builds a zip archive.
I'm working on YUM repositories for nim using fedora build service COPR. This is what I've got so far http://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/avsej/nim-devel
So I have builds for all major versions of centos and fedora right now using the tarball from downloads.
Right now this problem is kind of blocking me https://github.com/Araq/Nim/issues/2793, with it I cannot say for sure if the build was successful or not.
Next step will be setup crontask wich will package development branch, create SRPM and ping COPR to update the repository. When I will get it robust enough, I think I can try to integrate it with buildbot.