Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!sunic!dkuug!iesd!iesd.auc.dk!fischer From: fischer@iesd.auc.dk (Lars P. Fischer) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: Re: Why not distribute binaries? Message-ID: Date: 23 Feb 90 01:04:57 GMT References: <1990Feb21.150131.10382@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> Sender: news@iesd.auc.dk (UseNet News) Distribution: comp Organization: Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Aalborg Lines: 27 In-reply-to: smith@darwin's message of 21 Feb 90 15:01:31 GMT In article <1990Feb21.150131.10382@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> smith@darwin (Steven Smith) writes: >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. There simply are too many different types of machines. And even for one architecture, some people like /usr/lib/X11, others prefer /home/local/X11/lib, and so on. Also, remember that everytime there is a patch, The X Consortium, or MIT, would to recompile the whole thing for N different machines. Too much work. >But it seems that a simple binary+library shipment is all that most people >want anyway. If there really is a need for this, some large Sun site, say, could easily make available a SPARC binary dist on some machine. Sun.com would be a good choice :-). Remember, you get what you pay for ... /Lars -- Lars Fischer, fischer@iesd.auc.dk | One thing the UNIX system does not need CS Dept., Univ. of Aalborg, DENMARK. | is more features. -- Kernighan & Pike