Subject: RE: Beta-19 and configurations....
From: [email-masked] (Vassilii Khachaturov)

7 Feb 1998 05:04:38 -0800
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
To: "'Earnie Boyd'" <[email-masked]>
Cc: "Gnu-Win32 (E-mail)" <[email-masked]>

It's true that most people (esp. those upgrading from an earlier
gnuwin32 distr.)
will not like any "standard" directories instead of their
dirs/mounts/symlinks/whatever.
Yet, if our objective is provide an out-of-box user-friendly solution
for those who just
want a set of cute UNIX tools with a free compiler set up, and are
generally afraid of
any complicated admin. tasks, we can have an option in the install
wizard that will
create some (or even provide a choice) standard dir. scheme. As well, an
optional
component to set up could be curses/terminfo, plus some trivial terminal
utilities.

I personally know of some people (from my work) that were afraid of
gnuwin32 b18 because of the
complicated installation proc. (many env. vars and directories to be set
up to
have an actual possibility to compile things mostly out-of-box). They
just didn't have time
and were not sure that they will succeed. One of them even had Linux
experience
-- but just thought that the distribution is too raw after he read the
readme that comes with
cdk.exe. After I just copied my dirs (w/ termcap, curses and many term.
utils) to his workstation,
and gave away my .bashrc to start playing with, they were just happy --
and use gnuwin32 ever since.
Diskspace was not that crucial for them -- my /usr/local included many
esoteric dev. tools, e.g.
gnuwin32->pilot cross-compiling suite, which none of them needed. But
they preferred the extra
several megs wasted instead of creating their own personal minimalistic
setup.

To summarize, I would like to remind of the "good old days" when Linux
was 
a synonym to kernel hacking. Everyone had to compile/install everything
from the scratch.
Afterwards, several standard distributions came (like Slackware, RedHat,
Debian),
the latter introduced a smart package dependancies tracking mechanism
and a sophisticated pakages upgrade
management -- and all this attracted many more (less experienced) users
to the Linux community, some of which,
in turn, turned later on to be Linux developers. So, I think that an
investment into reasons that are minor
for the veteran gnuwin32 users, and, especially, developers -- like the
`install' ".exe" patch, friendlier
setup, proper termcap for gnuwin32 advertised everywhere where people
would look for termcap/curses on gnuwin32,
more compiled packages provided to begin with, mixed case completion
(and, a propos, the mount info
registry storage location I have recently written about) -- all those
things one can live without, but which are asked for again
and again by new people that pass by gnuwin32, could pay off in a
similar community boost.

You all to decide.

vassilii

-
For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to
"[email-masked]" with one line of text: "help".