>o Binary releases are a lot of effort and aren't very portable.
>
> Just look at hugs/src/distrib to see the hoops I have to jump through
> to build a binary release for Win-32. And then on close examination
> we find that the notion of a "Win32" platform to be a figment of M$s
> imagination so we have to try to do both a Win-NT and a Win95 distrib.
> Blech, blech, blech.
So you want to let one thousand Hugs users suffer! (a) I think this
extra level of indirection where one person sacrifices himself
for the sake of the majority is a better solution, and (b) if you
think you will save yourself some work, I think you will get home
from a cold country fair (is what we say in Dutch) You will
be swamped with bug reports. I must miss the point here.
Anyway, I refuse to use software that does not come with an automatic
install-shield installation, and wouldn't it be a great pity if you would
loose me as a Hugs user ;-) Seriously, the most effective way to kill
Hugs is to stop providing an self-install binary Windows distribution.
BTW when will you distribute a WinCE version?
> Similarily, we've got an x86 linux box - but do people want libc or
glibc?
> What if they're got sparc-linux? What if they have x86-free-bsd?
>o Source releases are less problematic but still take effort.
> eg One more thing that has to be changed if we reorganise the
> Hugs directory structure.
Linux people propably are happier with a source-only release, even worse,
they would be extremely unhappy if they did not get the sources.
>o Which package format do we use?
> RPM and Debian are both popular (there's a debian package but no rpm at
> the mo). There's also a FreeBSD "port".
Excuse my ignorance, but what is a "package".
>> And since we're letting one question lead to another... would it be
possible
>> to package the source tar with a unique root directory name? I.e.
hugs-1.5,
>> or hugs-May1998.
>
>I'll give it a shot - but this messes up attempts to build
>automatic scripts which build packages. We already have problems with
>changing the filename of the tarfile from one release to another.
Isn't the purpose of a script to make things easier and more configurable?
(so, can't you just "lambda abstract" over the filename?)
After a long day of Happy Hugs Hacking,
Erik
PS We have uploaded a new preview release of HaskellScript at
www.haskell.org/active/activehaskell.html that support the Windows
Scripting host. Be prepared for some awesome demos soon.
