From: gleasokr@rintintin.Colorado.EDU (Kris Gleason) Subject: Re: Why so many binary distributions (was Re: Nethack 3.1 is out! Who will port it?) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 1993 08:41:27 GMT
drew@ophelia.cs.colorado.edu (Drew Eckhardt) writes:
>With systems that small, there isn't enough room left over to compile
>moderate sized programs, let alone larger packages like GCC (30M),
>TeX, or X11 (approaching 200M for the whole distribution).
Ok... I agree that a good set of binary distributions is a nice thing to
have for Linux. PC's are not DECStations; they don't compile a large dis-
tribution in a half an hour (try six to eight on a 386sx), and not too many
of us have gigabyte hard drives to keep all of this source on.
HOWEVER, if there's one thing I can't stand, it's a .tar.Z file with the
binaries only (maybe the man pages, too). People who insist on posting
binaries, IMHO, should at least tell where the originals came from, and
include diffs against the originals. (It wouldn't be too much to ask for
all of the original documentation, either).
Kris