[gambit-list] Gambit installers

Taylor R Campbell campbell at mumble.net
Mon Jun 25 01:43:04 EDT 2007


   Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:09:57 -0400
   From: Marc Feeley <feeley at iro.umontreal.ca>

   Does anyone have experience creating installers for Windows and MacOS  
   X?  What are the best free installers?

On OS X, Apple's standard installation mechanism is the .pkg format.
However, personally, I think these are counterproductive.  They are
essentially a mechanism for arbitrary shell scripts to be run as root
to install complex software, without recording much information about
what effects the scripts had, so there is no standard way to uninstall
packages.  See `man packagemaker' for more details on building them if
you'd like to.  Some companies also use their own in-house installer
mechanisms that tend to be overcomplicated and not especially useful.

I prefer using MacPorts <http://www.macports.org/> for this sort of
thing, and in fact there already is a port in MacPorts for Gambit
4.0b22.  It's straightforward to turn this into a .pkg, too, with
MacPorts, if you so desire: `port pkg gambit-c'.  There are other
similar package managers, like Fink and Nix, but my experience with
MacPorts has been much better.



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