Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!think!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU!rws
From: rws@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Bob Scheifler)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Why not distribute binaries?
Message-ID: <9002212036.AA00266@expire.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: 21 Feb 90 20:36:08 GMT
References: <1990Feb21.150131.10382@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 33

I told myself to ignore this message.  I told myself to ignore this message.

    Can someone tell me why MIT insists on shipping source only?

I must say, I am continually amazed at the willingness of the public to
demand arbitrary amounts of work from other people.

    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.

Haven't you learned yet that X is a vendor conspiracy to sell more memory and
disks?

    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?).

Why don't you and yours make your own binaries available in this fashion?

    But it seems that a simple binary+library shipment is all that most people
    want anyway.

Probably more than 70% of the bug reports we initially received were from
people who ran into problems trying to build different configurations than
what we ever tested (much less ran on a normal basis) at MIT.  Different
OS versions, different compilers, different destination directories, different
almost everything.  Binary distributions would be of no help to those people.
And of course, every so often we put out source patches; I suppose you want us
to put out complete new binary distributions with each patch as well?  And
no doubt you're willing to give me some money to pay for the extra disk space
we'll need, and the extra person we'll probably need just to try and keep all
those binaries up to date; I'd like unmarked $20's in used suitcases, please.