mwm@ea.UUCP (06/09/84)
#N:ea:4300001:000:1323
ea!mwm Jun 8 16:41:00 1984
Having just installed arizona!{whm,ralph}'s Icon distribution, I would
like to publicly thank them for the quality of the distribution, and
point out to the net the things they did to make this installation
easier for me. These are things that most distributions don't have,
that every distribution of any size should have.
1) A shell script that accepts arguments describing the target
system, and edits Makefiles and header files appropriately.
2) A directory of sample programs to test the installed system on.
3) A shell script to test all the sample programs.
4) Output from that shell script for a correctly installed system.
5) Hardcopy of all documentation, so those sites without phototypesetter
hardware (like us) will have something to xerox.
6) Machine readable copy of all documentation, so those sites with
phototypesetter hardware can modify the documentation.
7) Documentation on installation, manual pages for everything, and a
bibliography of further references.
8) Bug report forms.
Nearly every distribution has some of these things, but I haven't seen
any other Unix software distribution that even approaches this level.
If every distribution where of this form, we'd all spend less time
installing distributions, and more time writing code (and building
good distributions :-).
<mike