[racket-dev] Downloading DrRacket for Mac is hard?

About a minute ago, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
> 
> Eli, I must say I appreciate some of your concerns but some 
> I don't comprehend. 
> 
> (1) My hunch is that most of our downloaders -- especially
> technically unsavy (what's the right word here?) people -- 
> download one and only one thing from us. 

Yes.


> (2) We need to accommodate them mostly, not the people who
> understand language packages. 

Right -- which is why I suggest no additional verbiage.  Just a more
emphasized "download" button.


> (3) If it works for FF/Mozilla, why should it not work for us? 
> Could we write a program that 'steals and adapts' their dowmload
> code on a regular base and thus keeps ours uptodate for the next
> N years? 

Not really.  The thing is that our code does more -- it does the
sorting that I talked about (so when you do get to click the platform
combo box, you'll see the more relevant choices at the beginning).
I'll do something rough in a minute and will post when it's up.

Ideally, there would be some random JS library that could be included
that would give a precise guess, but that can't work in general
because of some of the problems I mentioned earlier (like Windows
x86_64 users who want to get the 32 bit version).  I didn't see
anything close to what we need for that at the time, so we have the
current code.  (And that code *is* based on the mozilla code that does
the guessing, but tweaked to make that sorting possible.)

(Again, I think that just a more obvious download button would do most
of the work.  The exact guess is needed only to eliminate the combo
box completely.)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!