I see a question on sage-support where someone had troubles on OS X, as he had
installed a 10.6 binary on a 10.5 machine. With all the different binaries, I
can see it being fairly easy to pick the wrong one.
It got me thinking whether it would be more sensible if we distributed Sage as a
self-extracting shell script, using something like 'makeself'
http://megastep.org/makeself/
Then one runs a shell script which extracts all the files, but which can run
various checks and take various user inputs.
Advantages it would bring, would be:
* Ability to verify the archive is not corrupted.
* Check the binary is for the right system.
* Check CPU has the features needed. Perhaps copy optimised libraries if the
person has a suitable CPU
* Check if SELinux is enabled, if that is a problem.
* etc etc etc
With a bit more effort, it is probably possible to make one archive which
installs on all Linux distributions. Mathematica does not have one for Fedora,
one for Ubuntu etc.
The Solaris installer for Mathematica has both the SPARC and x86 binaries, and
will allow you to install them for either, although it defaults to whatever the
system is.
I've never used 'makeself', but it seems to work well for Wolfram Research, and
should stop people installing the wrong binary.
Dave
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