[indiana-discuss] Quick brainstorm on the 'Welcome to...' guide

[Peter Tribble]

On Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 12:47 AM, Glynn Foster <Glynn.Foster at sun.com> wrote:
>
>  I think we need to start making external software much more available. Who wants
>  to have to go to the trouble of downloading a tarball, setting up a build
>  environment, building that piece of software and installing it? People generally
>  want to download a binary package and have it work out of the box, so they can
>  actually get on with what they want to do. Ruby devs are an easy example to
>  point out, but it could as equally be Java ones.

Depends on the need. Now, I wouldn't want to have to build from scratch
some random bit of junk that my kids would find useful. For my home
systems, a package repository is really useful.

On my enterprise systems, though, it's a different matter. For stuff that's
crucial to the business then having total control of the software stack is
essential - and building it ourselves is one way to do that. (And yes, I've
been screwed over by trusting what the OS supplies and having it swept
from under my feet by some - seemingly unrelated - change.)

And to be honest, I've always found it much easier to grab software
from the source rather than waste time trying to work out how the
version that the OS supplies has been mangled.

On that last point, we need to go beyond mere availability of the files
comprising a piece of software, and do a better job of integration and
making it easier for complex systems to be built and configured. If
that means the dreaded wizards, then that's what we need to do.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/