Re: Archive and Binary Swarm distributions: change strategy?

[Ginger Booth]

Pauljohn,
    I agree a real Swarm programmer needs to learn Objective-C, etc. The
goal of the binary distribution is just to make the learning curve
easier to climb, instead of making the first few steps so discouragingly
difficult.  Learning to configure tcl/tk/blt/gcc is more a sysadmin job
than a programmer job.  If the process made you a better Swarm
programmer, it might be worth it.  But once you get it done, you've
learned nothing.

    So let's agree to differ.

pauljohn wrote:
> 
> I'm sorry, I don't think it is asking too much to do an archive intall.
> Anyone who is expected to be able to write Objective C code and manage
> Makefiles is capable of following directions about unzipping and
> configuring tcl/tk.  If swarm were a "drag and drop" point and click
> kind of thing, I might understand your position.  But it isn't.
> The directions need to be clear and thorough, so more effort should be
> paid to that.
> 
> I can't imagine a user who is going to be effective with swarm who could
> not do those things.  I don't want to put words into your mouth, but I
> suppose you are thinking about people who might like to use swarm but
> don't know if they would, so they need an easy route to try it out.
> Maybe for those people we could just distribute an MPEG file showing
> what heatbugs looks like.  Or, as a second thought, if they just want to
> run premade applications, couldn't we distribute executables of
> "swarmapps 1.0.5" and let them run them?  Why do they need the swarm
> source at all?
> 
> People can learn about their pcs if they have an incentive.
> 
> On Wed, 4 Mar 1998, Ginger Booth wrote:
> 
> >  Though I understand your suggestion, Paul, I also know how truly
> > difficult those compiles are.  That's how the current trend got
> > launched.  Many (most?) potential Swarm users could not pay the door fee
> > of compiling and configuring the prerequisite software.
> >
> 
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