At 2:16 PM -0600 11/28/99, John N. Alegre wrote:
>What gives? Why the shar file anyway? bz2 was ok, gz even better. shar files
>aren't even compressed????
Well, as I understand it, this is indeed compressed. It would be silly
not to. The web page described it as a self-extracting zip file, if I
remember correctly. In addition, having a shell script handle the install
allows things like environment vars to be set, or library version checking
to be done, etc. Now, I'm not a member of the blackdown team in any way
shape or form, but I imagine that they wanted the flexibility that such
a large, cross-distribution software package deserves.
Just think about Winblows and Mac. When was the last time you downloaded
a large development environment for Windows and it wasn't in the form
of an installer? Even the JDK for other platforms comes in the form of an
installer...why not linux too?
Incidentally, I'm sure one could discover quite a bit by just reading the
darn shell script. It's probably even commented... I haven't downloaded
it yet, and given the problems people are having with AMD chips, it's
unlikely I will for a while, until that gets resolved. I clearly can't
release a java software product which is only supported on PII chips!
-Will
P.S. Rather than waste time speculating, like I just have, I'd be quite
interested in a member of the blackdown team letting us know exactly
what the primary motivation behind the new packaging was.
___________________________________________
Will Koffel Course 21M
(617) 225-6428 ~*_*~
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Course 6
MIT '00 http://web.mit.edu/wkoffel/www
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