smith@darwin (Steven Smith) (02/22/90)
Archive-name: x11r4/21-Feb-90 Original-posting-by: smith@darwin (Steven Smith) Original-subject: Why not distribute binaries? (part2) Archive-site: ux1.cso.uiuc.edu [128.174.5.59] Reposted-by: emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) It seems that some have misunderstood my intentions from my original posting. I do not advocate removing the source, simply including pre-compiled versions of a few flavors (sun3,sun4,MicroVax,DecStation,hp,sgi,etc.) under the most resent release of their OS's. As far as trojan horses are concerned, I doubt that ANYONE searched through the entire source tree before simply trying a 'make World' on their copy of R4. And I would be much more likely to trust MIT for a clean release than any other site offering such a service. I have my source in tack, and I do go to it quite often. But that still doesn't explain why one must have it to use X (Thats a lot of code!). I would think that MIT would be more than happy to lower net traffic. And it would be nice if it didn't take a full day to get the software running. For those of you that are interested, the University of Illinois has the pre compiled code available for the Sun3 (3.5 and 4.0.3), and the Sun4(4.0.3c) on ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (128.174.5.59). I, they, and everyone else make no claim to its condition with respect to viri. But I have been using it for a month now. This is a service intended for the use of on campus sites, but I doubt that they would mind if others used it. More opinions, Flame me directly, support me publicly, Steve Smith smith@origin.life.uiuc.edu -- Steve Smith Research Programmer Center for Prokaryote Genome Analysis University of Illinois