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

9 Feb 1998 19:23:27 -0800
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To: Ronald Van Iwaarden <[email-masked]>
Cc: "Gnu-Win32 (E-mail)" <[email-masked]>

I suggest we all carefully think over and design WHAT exactly is to be
included into the distribution of b19, and what options should the setup
be given.
Maybe, it's worth to do less things in the setup GUI, and package a
minimalized perl+win32 support to manipulate the registry from upon the
installation?

Things I think are important from those that are not distributed
currently,
and were not cleanly announced previously as those to be icluded into
b19, are
(as understood, optional -- to be selected at the setup stage):

	* THE SOURCES -- ready to recompile all the tools in-place
This could be great in boosting up the development. I personally think
of some hacking around with cygwin.dll -- but still had no time with it,
especially due to the initial overhead of the sources installation and
compilation env. setup.

This is the way they did it in Linux, and it worked.

	* (previously discussed): termcap/curses, minimal terminal programs

	* Natively compiled editors (vim, emacs --?)
	
	* a couple of terminal games compiled
btw check http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~vassilii/pub/boa/

	* definitely the "remote" suite -- I personally have had several people
seduced into gnuwin32 just showing them a colorful telnet into Linux
with 'midnight commander' running there -- and a WORKING (as opposed to
the one from the NT resource kit) inetd just with the in.telnetd
capability.

	* think of package management and clean upgradability (wouldn't you
like a simple script to turn the symlinks from b18 to be "system" when
going coolview)

	* X11R6, clean instructions on setting up X server and links to all the
tested X server packages.

I know the gnuwin32 goal is more like "you have the kernel, do things
yourselves" right now -- my cry is that this goal is old enough, and the
things grew, so why not changing the goal? Setting up a primitive
archive network of ported things, someone specializing on
distributions/packaging -- and things will evolve faster.

> Hmmm. I thought the install was relatively easy and I an new to WIN32

Well, this is exactly the point. I thought it's easy also -- I'm not
afraid
of setting environment variables manually, reading through manuals etc.
I do have an experience of tweaking with various programs source
distributions until they build on gnuwin32. I did lots of low-level and
realtime hacking in my life and my hands can't get much dirtier. :-)

However, what I am speaking about, is a number of suggestions to invest
in gnuwin32 promotion by making "quick start" possible as the initial
bundle setup becomes more automated and includes more components.

Those that are not to be convinced that gnuwin32 is a useful tool --
like you and me -- are already using it, and can live w/o the nice
things I had mentioned in my previous letter. I was mainly speaking
about attracting new people -- and that implies later naturally turning
some of them into another and another gnuwin32 promoters/developers.

In addition to my old examples, think of the successful 'configure'
script approach -- installation/configuration is much simpler now, and
sysadmins are praising the autoconf scripts, that freed them from most
of the makefile tweaking. Think also of the emerging KDE/Gnome
initiatives. Enough just hacking for yourselves, make things attractive
and usable -- and get the whole world praise in return (enough for me
personally for all the free UNIX consulting/soft. devel. I'm doing in my
spare time), or, if you feek like earning your living from it -- make it
even more attractive, so that more people think of using it and buying
support from you.
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