When I read http://love2d.org/wiki/Game_Distribution I started thinking about ways to improve distribution of löve games. Not that it's bad right now, it's easy to get stuff running on any platform. However, I think it could become even better with some pretty simple improvements to the standalone löve runtime on OSX and Windows, to make things easier for noobs and make löve games work the way people expect from some game they just downloaded.
Let's start with OSX. Mac users generally expect to simply download a .app-file (really a folder), placing it in their Applications folder and then running it. With löve as it is right now, a mac package would contain a .app-file and a .love-file, where the .love-file should be opened with the .app-file (I assume this is done by dropping the .love file onto the .app). This works, but it's not the way people expect to run games, they want a single .app-file. Since a .app is actually a folder, wouldn't it be easier if the löve runtime on mac looks for a file, say main.love, placed inside of it and runs that if nothing else is specified? Then you could rename your game main.love, place it inside love.app and then rename love.app to mygame.app, and everyone is happy.
On Windows, the .exe could simply look for main.love in the same folder as itself, it's nothing strange for a Windows application to be distributed as a .exe-file with a bunch of other files that have to be in the same folder. Then, the love.exe could simply be renamed mygame.exe and everyone is happy. An alternative would be to place the main.love inside the .exe-file, although this will probably confuse a lot of people (I know of no way to opening and looking at the contents of a .exe-file on Windows itself, although I guess it's possible).
On Linux, there isn't much need to improve as gams distributed as standalones for Linux generally requires a lot more than sudo apt-get install love and then double-clicking on a .love-file. Still, it could be imporved with a simple installation script that checks if you have love installed, and if not, installs it, then creates a .desktop-launcher that starts the game, and places the .desktop in /usr/share/applications so that it can be started through the Dash.
Good idea? Would it be hard to implement in future versions of the löve runtime?
