Daniel, On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 7:37 PM, Daniel Carrera <[email protected]> wrote: > This might be a stupid question, why is it so difficult to make a > static distribution? I was hoping it wouldn't be too hard.
I'd agree that it should be easy, but in practice, there are two major stumbling blocks: 1) With the combination of OSes and processors, we would end up supporting approximately a dozen or so static builds, each probably 1 Gb in size, as we have to build a perl from scratch for each combination. I know this because I did this for Mac OSX as an experiment prior to building SciKarl in January 2010. I also had to install Matlab on my machine. The Matlab install was particularly illuminating - it took about 10 web pages of selections, and one hour of installation downloads to get *basic* matlab installed. Remember, this wasn't building anything, this was just pulling down the binaries on a fast connection. Matlab and IDL have full time paid people dedicated to testing and debugging these build processes. We're volunteers donating our time to PDL - and thank goodness for the great people on this list who do so willingly! 2) More fundamentally, PDL is built on Perl, and people expect PDL to work with Perl modules they've installed themselves. WIth a static build, there would be two perls on a given system, leading to lots of Module confusion (I've tied myself in knots with this problem....) We also have PDL dependent on libraries that are beyond our control, such as fortran for PGPLOT, and I've always hit stumbling blocks with PLplot not correctly building, and then people (incorrectly) blame PDL for these problems. But, I could be wrong about this - if there's a magic way of building just one static PDL for Windows and one for Mac OS X, I'm all ears! Cheers, Matt _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
