[plt-scheme] New nightly-build installers

From: Eli Barzilay (eli at barzilay.org)
Date: Sun Jan 4 09:18:47 EST 2004

The nightly builds page contains now various installers for different
platforms.  This means that using the recent CVS version is just as
easy as using "official" distributions.  The relevant page is:

  http://download.plt-scheme.org/scheme/installers

See the bottom of that page for instructions.

Please send any feedback regarding anything at all (I prefer emails to
go directly to me since it's still in an early stage) -- from
information on the web page, to installer instruction texts.  I expect
a lot of rough edges that need smoothing.

Two specific thing where I will appreciate any help I can get are:

1. For the OSX dmg files, I couldn't find any way of setting the
   folder attributes to display the instructions background, and to
   set the icon positions.  I've spent a lot of google time but came
   up with nothing so far, so if anyone knows how to do this, I would
   very much like to hear about it.

2. The Windows installers were not tested too widely so far, I would
   like to hear if there are any problems (there might by some
   registry problems, and in addition I didn't try this on a non-NT
   Windows.)

Additional notes:

1. This will be the same mechanism that will be used for future
   releases, which is why it would be nice to get some feedback.

2. Download sizes are bigger now, because they contain the .zo files.
   (The extra download time should be much smaller than the time for
   generating the .zo files, even with a dialup connection...)

3. The `full' install type is no something that is officially
   distributed -- it is the whole exp-tagged cvs tree, fully compiled,
   including all documentations and the complete source tree.  This is
   why it's such a huge download compared to the others.

4. The consistent smaller size of Windows installers is not an optical
   illusion -- I'm now using the NSIS installer (from the WinAmp
   project) which has a new compression mode that is very efficient.

5. The sh installers for the different unix platforms are a shell
   wrapper around a tgz file that will check itself, unpack, run the
   installer to create executables, and create links if you ask it
   to.  For Linux, I will do something similar with an RPM file (which
   means that there will be no src rpm), so the size should reduce
   with the bzip2 compression.

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


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