Date: Sun, 16 May 1999 13:36:58 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
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To: Richard Dawe <richdawe AT bigfoot DOT com>
cc: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: DJGPP installer [Was: Script language for installer]
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On Fri, 14 May 1999, Richard Dawe wrote:

> Laurynas Biveinis wrote:
> > BTW, do you group zips into units which provide some level of
> > functionality, e.g. "C development" would include gcc*b.zip & co, or
> > just keep them separated and require user to know which zips he must
> > install for C, which for C++ and so on? In this case, your tool would be
> > back-end for mine. And script file should be changed to reflect this.
> 
> Well, I think it should be able to do both, e.g. for installing a group of
> files.

I doubt it would be easy to come up with lists of such groups, except,
maybe, in the case of the compiler and Binutils.  Even for the
compiler, there are all kinds of questions with no easy answers, like
do they need Make, or Patch, or GDB (these are all "C development"
tools).

Other packages would bring more difficult questions.  For example,
somebody who uses Emacs will need almost every package in v2gnu
(except Autoconf and Automake, perhaps), since Emacs invokes them from
one command or another.  Sed, Grep, Gawk, RCS, CVS, man, even TeX, to
name just a few.  Forget one of these, and some commands will fail.

Bash, Perl and Autoconf would trigger similar problems.  The only
solution is to tell them to download everything.

So I would suggest to abandon the desire to make it both flexible and
fool-proof, and instead come up with 2-3 basic packages, e.g. "just
C", "just C and C++"; and for Emacs, Perl, and the likes recommend
that they download all the auxiliary tools as well (a list of just
what ``all the auxiliary tools'' are would be nice).