chip@tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) (07/25/90)
[ Followups to news.misc. ] According to jay@splut.conmicro.com (Jay "you ignorant splut!" Maynard): >This is a rotten idea. That source is the prevalent form of software >distribution in the Unix environment is more an artifact of the >diversity of Unix systems than anything else. I'm sorry, you didn't beat the reaper. Blaming diversity for source distribution is exactly backwards. Wide distribution of source code -- and, more to the point, the inherent portability and malleability which is possible only for source code -- is a REASON for the diversity of Unix systems. If V5 Unix had been a binary distribution, would it exist today? Nope. >The IBM-PC world (the only one I'm intimately familiar with ... Oh. That explains the misunderstanding. >Breaking binaries on Usenet will get rid of them, all right, >but at the cost of cutting Usenet users off completely from >nearly all residtributed programs. The BBS world can take care of itself. Most of Usenet has other things to do. -- Chip, the new t.b answer man <chip@tct.uucp>, <uunet!ateng!tct!chip>