Real people (was RE: [UNIX]Building modular VMs)

David N. Smith (IBM) dnsmith at watson.ibm.com
Thu Oct 12 19:25:28 UTC 2000


At 10:06 -0700 10/12/00, Tim Rowledge wrote:
>"Raab, Andreas" wrote:
>
>>  But having an installer still does not convince me that the
>> standard release distribution should be made up by twenty files when only
>> one is necessary. What you should get in a distribution is:
>> * Exactly one image file,
>> * Exactly one changes file,
>> * Exactly one sources file, and,
>> * Exactly one application (e.g., VM).
>
>Well, I guess we just have to agree to disagree a bit. If you're distributing
>an end-user application I think an installer could hide the problem just as it
does for almost all commercial apps I've ever seen.
>...SNIP...
>Another possiblity for end-user deployments on Macs and Windows is binding
>components into the executable as resources. Better yet, the image etc ought to
>go there as well, then you only ship one file!
>
>tim

As an application builder, I'd like to bind the image and .exe file together, but things seem to mainly work fine without it at the moment. (As the image breaks up into parts, those should be bound into one image.)

I distribute a packed file containing a directory holding:

	VisiStar
		VisiStar.image	Image renamed & with new icon
		VisiStar.exe	Standard executable, renamed
		VisiStarStuff	a folder of stuff needed by VisiStar.image

I preload a big bunch of images so that they aren't distributed, and don't have to be loaded from disk.

I arrange the VisiStar folder so that only the VisiStar.Image is showing.

One thing that is seems to be missing is a way to change the application ID (on the Mac) so that VisiStar.exe is run only when VisiStar.image is clicked, and not when GoldenProduct is clicked, since they may deliver different versions of the executable. Maybe a standard set of names can be reserved with Apple and made available to the Squeak community: SQ01 - SQ99, with a subset for Squeak Central, another subset for users but with someone acting as a registrar, and another for users to use with no registration?

Dave
_______________________________
David N. Smith
IBM T J Watson Research Center
Hawthorne, NY
_______________________________
Any opinions or recommendations
herein are those of the author  
and not of his employer.





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