From: vassilii AT optimedia DOT co DOT il (Vassilii Khachaturov) Subject: RE: Beta-19 and configurations.... 7 Feb 1998 05:04:38 -0800 Message-ID: <317FF5D11BF2D011B81E00A024960DC41D74FD.cygnus.gnu-win32@axis.optimedia.co.il> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain To: "'Earnie Boyd'" Cc: "Gnu-Win32 (E-mail)" 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 "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".