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

Tim Rowledge tim at sumeru.stanford.edu
Thu Oct 12 17:06:40 UTC 2000



"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. For the developer setup, it
really shouldn't be a problem anyway; anyone that can't cope with a relatively
simple collection of files probably shouldn't be trying to develop!
(I'm not suggesting that we make things as complicated as many open source
projects seem to be, by the way. I just tried to get code crusader onto my
linuxPPC machine.  Get a PPC .rpm, try to install it - get told you need three
other packages. Get them and try to install them - the 'base' package clainm
you need two others. They're source tarfiles. Readme's claim you just type make
in the directory, and make claims there is nothing there... this is not a state
to aspire to!)
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





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