Rosalyn Lum [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi,
DDJ is working on a Lightweight Language CD and would like to possibly
include the MAC version of Python on the disk with the user
documentation. Is it OK if we include the Installer and copy your
documentation with with proper credits appearing on all copies?.
Thanks you,
Rosalyn Lum
Technical Editor
Dr. Dobb's Journal
Hi. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the Installer, but let me
explain how a Fink installation works and how (in my opinion) you might
distribute it. Don't take my answer as the final word, though, because
this hasn't come up too much before and the fink-devel list likes to
discuss these things a bit.
First, you will need to provide your users with a way to do a basic Fink
installation *for those users who do not yet have Fink installed*. It's
pretty important that the instructions you give indicate that if Fink
is *already* installed, it should not be installed a second time. Probably
the easiest way to let them install Fink is by means of the binary
installer, available as a disk image file linked from
http://fink.sourceforge.net/download/index.php
Second, your users will want to install Python. To do this via fink, they
install the python package and a bunch of packages it depends on (readline,
tcltk, dlcompat, zlib, expat, gdbm, gmp, db3, and whatever else THEY
depend on). Assuming that all of these packages have open-source licenses,
the Fink project supplies binary .deb files for them as well as source
files. You could easily construct an installer which, after Fink was
installed, put the relevant .deb and .tar.gz source files into the places
that Fink expects to find them. This would save your users the trouble of
downloading everything over the internet. (Please be sure to follow
open-source licenses by putting the source files on the CD along with
the .deb files, if you choose this method.)
You'll need to write good instructions, though, for how the users would
then use Fink's tools to do the actual installation of Python.
OK, perhaps someone will object to the advice I've given, so let's wait
a bit for more reaction :-)
-- Dave
P.S. Fink 0.4.0 should be out in a week or 10 days; since the current
version is quite old, you might want to wait a bit for the new one.
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