Re: Re(3): Mac OS X issues

On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 10:46:57AM -0400, Peter Lovell wrote:
> 
> On Apr 20, 2005, at 10:34 AM, Chris Pickett wrote:
> 
> >What about Fink?  Too much overhead for the average user?  There are 
> >lots and lots of nice goodies in there.
> 
> True, and I use many of the pieces. But I was trying to make it as easy 
> as possible for OS X users to get and use sablevm. Some will be 
> developers and be reasonably comfortable but others will be more like 
> end-users and be put off by too much installation.
> 
> But anyhow, the fink version is only at 1.18 still (at least for 
> "stable"). The opendarwin version is 1.22 but to get it you have to 
> install darwinports itself and then build jikes from source. Not too 
> hard for a developer but quite a hurdle for some others.
> 
> For the same reason, it might be nice to include popt library pre-built 
> for OS X (which I think GBP was working towards for some platforms 
> also).
> 

Hi Peter,

How much difficult is it to build jikes and popt compared to SableVM?

>From the Darwin ports, jikes seem only to be a
fetch, configure, make, make install
away.  Does it have build/runtime dependencies not installed on OS X?

The thing is that we need to define the audience we are targetting.

Since the OS X SableVM user will have to compile SableVM and would like
to have SableVM even if OS X comes pre-installed already with a JVM,
then it is likely that the user interested in SableVM has some technical
background.  The user targeted might not want to build 10-20 software
packages etc., I agree 100% with you on decreasing the dependencies and
making it simple to install.

But I do not think there is much a need for a jikes binary package if jikes
can be build as follows:
1) fetch the file (we would provide the URL)
2) ./configure && make && make install


David

---

David Bélanger
Web page:   http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~dbelan2/
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