Sounds like a good idea.
David

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 08:19, Dr. David Kirkby <[email protected]>wrote:

> I see a question on sage-support where someone had troubles on OS X, as he
> had installed a 10.6 binary on a 10.5 machine. With all the different
> binaries, I can see it being fairly easy to pick the wrong one.
>
> It got me thinking whether it would be more sensible if we distributed
> Sage as a self-extracting shell script, using something like 'makeself'
>
> http://megastep.org/makeself/
>
>
> Then one runs a shell script which extracts all the files, but which can
> run various checks and take various user inputs.
>
>
> Advantages it would bring, would be:
>
> * Ability to verify the archive is not corrupted.
> * Check the binary is for the right system.
> * Check CPU has the features needed. Perhaps copy optimised libraries if
> the person has a suitable CPU
> * Check if SELinux is enabled, if that is a problem.
> * etc etc etc
>
> With a bit more effort, it is probably possible to make one archive which
> installs on all Linux distributions. Mathematica does not have one for
> Fedora, one for Ubuntu etc.
>
> The Solaris installer for Mathematica has both the SPARC and x86 binaries,
> and will allow you to install them for either, although it defaults to
> whatever the system is.
>
> I've never used 'makeself', but it seems to work well for Wolfram
> Research, and should stop people installing the wrong binary.
>
> Dave
>
> --
> To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscribe@**
> googlegroups.com <sage-devel%[email protected]>
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/**
> group/sage-devel <http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel>
> URL: http://www.sagemath.org
>

-- 
To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to 
[email protected]
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel
URL: http://www.sagemath.org

Reply via email to