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

Sounds like it is time for Guillaume to explore a prototype, if he's
still interested in that, then.

Robby

On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> 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!
> _________________________________________________
>  For list-related administrative tasks:
>  http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/dev
>