I can see both sides. It is important to have ease of installation so that the programs can be disseminated to more users. This will help the development process. That being said, it is important to have a committed group to keep up to date with the sources so that everyone is talking about the same versions and can benefit from the latest improvements. I suspect taht once the horae software reaches an advanced version number, issues like this will become less important as stability in the basic code is reached. Carlo On Mon, 19 Apr 2004, Bruce Ravel wrote:
On Monday 19 April 2004 05:11 pm, Jeff Terry wrote:
It's also so unmac-like to force users to compile from scratch.
I acknowledge that this was said with tongue in cheek. Still, I cannot come up with the right language to express how extremely little being "mac-like" matters to me.
That said, I think that I neglected to mention a few of the underlying assumptions of my last posting.
Assumption #1: My codes have bugs. Some of them get in the way of getting work done.
Assumption #2: I am constantly working on fixing the problems in my codes. That is a good thing.
Assumption #3: People would prefer to avail themselves of code that fixes serious bugs in the timeliest manner possible because it is better to use code with fewer bugs than code with more bugs.
I maintain the source code package continuously. Thus, the fastest way to disseminate bug fixes to end users is in the form of source code. This has the additional advantage of not requiring the additional and probably time consuming step of building and verifying a binary package.
But I am not the sort to pass judgement on a culture that I am not a part of. If doing things the "Macintosh way" takes priority over doing anaylsis with code which has fewer bugs, than that is just fine with me.
B
-- Carlo U. Segre -- Professor of Physics Associate Dean for Special Projects, Graduate College Illinois Institute of Technology Voice: 312.567.3498 Fax: 312.567.3494 Carlo.Segre@iit.edu http://www.iit.edu/~segre