Remove the binary distributions?

There's quite a lot of complexity (and slowness) in the E build for 
producing platform-specific releases (e.g. E-win32-x86-0.9.3a.zip). Is 
anybody using these?

The build process seems to be:

- src/bin/* contains various SWT binaries (presumably out-of-date by 
now; last update was Feb 2008)
- just the binaries for the building platform get copied to dist/bin/$osdir
- dist gets copied to export/dist
- export/dist gets copied to export/puredist
- export/puredist/bin/$osdir is deleted

How would people feel about having a single E release (just puredist), 
without any jars? This means that people writing SWT applications would 
be responsible for distributing swt.jar with their application somehow 
(e.g. using a Maven pom.xml, a 0install feed, or bundling a copy).

However, you already have to do that anyway if:

- You're producing non-Windows releases
- You're producing 64-bit Windows releases
- You're producing 32-bit Windows releases using an up-to-date SWT
- You want to use other libraries

We could make the rune "run" command depend on SWT in the 0install feed 
so that the SWT example scripts continue to work without extra effort 
(for people using 0install). That would avoid making every E program 
depend on SWT (e.g. headless servers). People not using 0install or a 
distribution package manager would need to install SWT for their 
platform manually.


-- 
Dr Thomas Leonard
IT Innovation Centre
Gamma House, Enterprise Road,
Southampton SO16 7NS, UK


tel: +44 23 8059 8866

mailto:tal-v5nx5w6akNyLE8xUarVfuPLx9OUvmyODWmv/[email protected]
http://www.it-innovation.soton.ac.uk/