Re: InstallSh...

[Valeriy E. Ushakov]

On Fri, Nov 28, 1997 at 05:54:02PM +0000, address@hidden wrote:

> It seems a pity to combine something as elegant as Lout with utter
> bloated crap like InstallShit^h^held, there are many freeware
> alternatives (see http://www.windows95.com/ or equivalent), one of which
> is bound to be neater. It would also be nice to leave the files
> unencrypted (InstallShit usually puts the files in proprietary archives)
> in the .zip so that people can install manually if they wish to.
> 
> (I hope this does not look too much like criticism, I do appreciate very
> much your contributions to the Lout world, just that you may not be
> aware that InstallSh* is really really bad.)

Well, I have beed a Unix weenie since I first logged into 2.9BSD on
PDPD11, damn, I was 15 then.  All this time I've been living under
Unix, I run uVAX2000 at home, I was never really exposed to dos or
wintel.  Now, 10 years after, I do hack on NT because I'm paid to (the
project targets Solaris and Win32).  And after two months of working
with NT I just cannot allow myself to say in public what I think about
NT using the words I'd like to use.  Perhaps the best quotation I saw
was in Erik Naggum signature...

    NT 4.0 -- an abbreviation of "new technology for naught"


Emotions away.  The only thing the interactive installation needs to
do is to ask the location to install the distribution to and set
LOUTLIB environment variable and update the PATH.  If lout is going to
be used as a backend, lusers wouldn't want to do this by hand,
microsoft has already destructed their wit.  I'm planning good old zip
for sane people and some chrome "for the rest of them"...
InstallShield is a buzzword, it rings the bell for lusers.

I'm open to suggestions.  If you can recommend a good free
installer/sweeper - I will take a look.

PS: I compiled with vc5 - it runs pretty well on standard docs but
    cannot find @Roman&1 and @UCAlpha&1.  Looks like yet another ftell
    problem in SearchFile.  I will investigate it as time permits.

PPS: When I profiled Lout, I learnt that it spends some 1/3 of it's
     run time in read().  I think that db code and SearchFile in
     particular is responsible for this.  mmap (if available) would
     help to increase performance.

SY, Uwe
-- 
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