I read through the 41 (so far) messages in this thread and would like to
add my twopence -
I have no experience with, little interest in, and am usually confused
by installing software in Windows.
I do make a lot of use of J in Apple environments OS X 10 - I'm
currently running j64-804 in a beta version of OS X 10.11, El
Capitan,where it seems to behave quite well. I'm running J in a beta of
iOS9 where it has some serious GUI problems - I keep intending to post a
separate note about my troubles in that case.
I agree with Norman Drinkwater that a .dmg file would be nice (and very
easy to create) for a Mac installation.
Personally I see no reason not to just drop the J app folder into
/Applications - that is the absolute standard way to install software
under OS X. One minor change I make is to edit .../bin/profilex.ijs to
incorporate the suggestion:
NB. example 3: user in home/Documents
NB. user=. home,'/Documents',userx
since ~/Documents/ is IMHO the correct and sensible place to store the
associated files. The root of the user directory is (at least on a Mac)
a very unusual place to store such app related documents. If it were up
to me, the instructions would be to drop the application (app folder)
into the /Applications folder - and have the default for associated
files be ~/Documents/.
Once launched, things like jhs.app can be pinned to the launch bar for
easy future access. I do find it a minor pain that I have to
specifically allow launching the application because it is downloaded
from a non-registered developer, but that is probably a drop in the
bucket compared to the pain of "properly registering" the application
with Apple.
Deleting an app folder/bundle from /Documents is (almost always)
sufficient to uninstall an application (and certainly is for J).
I (strongly) agree with Chris about keeping IDE stuff separate from a
minimal installation e.g. in either the Mac or, especially, Linux. On my
Linux systems I install in /usr/local/lib and make symlinks in
/usr/local/bin. This works very well for invoking from a terminal (which
is 99.9% of the interactive work I do with j) and from cgi scripts and
!# shell scripts.
<ramble>
As an example of a minimalist system, I'm toying with the idea of
installing j in a router. I use some continuously running scripts in my
Linux servers to be rude to some of the www scoundrels who are
continually (and I'm not exaggerating) trying to break into any system
with a public IP address. Having the router block the thousands of
guesses at ssh users and passwords would move the problem one hop closer
to the source. I will experiment with the bare minimal set of stuff to
run in the router environment (a stripped down Debian Linux).
I'm continually impressed with what a small amount of system resources
are consumed by a j process that loops on time intervals as little as
one second and looks at system information and either records logs
network activity or takes action against intrusion attacks etc. For
example, a process that looks every minute at system logs and blocks
attacks after 10 attempts from a given IP address has been running
continuously for almost a year and has consumed 7 minutes 11 seconds of
processor time (on an ancient 400 Mhz processor).
</ramble>
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