Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!dino!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!darwin!smith
From: smith@darwin (Steven Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Why not distribute binaries?
Keywords: X11 binaries
Message-ID: <1990Feb21.150131.10382@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 21 Feb 90 15:01:31 GMT
Sender: news@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News)
Distribution: comp
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Lines: 19

Can someone tell me why MIT insists on shipping source only?  It seems to
make little sense to ship 40meg of source so that people can generate 12meg
of installed software (manual and all) after six hours of disk grinding.
Wouldn't it make much more sense to reduce net traffic and unneeded recom-
pilation by having binary tar files for the x different arch's (or at least
the most used ones?).  I appreciate how much effort went into the imake
makefile generation so that one source tree will compile on all machines.
But it seems that a simple binary+library shipment is all that most people
want anyway.

Just my humble opinions.

Steve Smith
smith@origin.life.uiuc.edu
--
Steve Smith
Research Programmer
Center for Prokaryote Genome Analysis
University of Illinois