Re: Re(3): Mac OS X issues

On Apr 21, 2005, at 3:54 PM, David Bélanger wrote:

> 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

Hi David,
jikes and popt are comparable in complexity (of installation!) to 
sablevm.

Doing it is no problem as long as you know where to find what you need. 
If we provide a tarball and building is configure&&make&&make install 
then that's quite workable. Having to first install darwinports is much 
more of a pain. Same is true for popt, although building popt is weird 
...

<aside> I've not had the time to really investigate popt and rpm. 
Building popt just on its own from the popt tarball has many 
dependencies on xgettext, gettext, iconv and others I don't remember. 
But building it from within the rpm directory structure is simple -- it 
looks for the presence of "../rpm.c" if I remember correctly. For our 
usage, we certainly do NOT want translation and internationalization, 
so I turn all this off. Many others, of course, want and appreciate 
these capabilities so we need to think about how to make this part 
(possibly quite complex) simple for users to do.
</aside>

I think a long-term desirable goal is to provide sablevm as binary (and 
source) via fink etc so that it could just be installed, and would not 
require command-line building. Almost by definition, sablevm users 
today are comfortable with command-line usage. But I feel that the key 
to wider usage of sablevm is to make it easy for people who don't feel 
very comfortable with command-line. We just have to work on finding the 
best mean to get there.

Regards.....Peter