Should Sage binaries be distributed as a self-extracting file?

[Dr. David Kirkby]

I see a question on sage-support where someone had troubles on OS X, as he had
installed a 10.6 binary on a 10.5 machine. With all the different binaries, I
can see it being fairly easy to pick the wrong one.

It got me thinking whether it would be more sensible if we distributed Sage as a
self-extracting shell script, using something like 'makeself'

http://megastep.org/makeself/

Then one runs a shell script which extracts all the files, but which can run
various checks and take various user inputs.

Advantages it would bring, would be:

* Ability to verify the archive is not corrupted.
* Check the binary is for the right system.
* Check CPU has the features needed. Perhaps copy optimised libraries if the
person has a suitable CPU
* Check if SELinux is enabled, if that is a problem.
* etc etc etc

With a bit more effort, it is probably possible to make one archive which
installs on all Linux distributions. Mathematica does not have one for Fedora,
one for Ubuntu etc.

The Solaris installer for Mathematica has both the SPARC and x86 binaries, and
will allow you to install them for either, although it defaults to whatever the
system is.

I've never used 'makeself', but it seems to work well for Wolfram Research, and
should stop people installing the wrong binary.

Dave

[David Roe]

Sounds like a good idea.
David

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[David Kirkby]

On 10 February 2012 21:20, David Roe <ro...@math.harvard.edu> wrote:

Sounds like a good idea.
David

Thank you. Seems you are the only one to comment, so I guess it wont happen any time soon (if at all).

Dave

[Volker Braun]

Those are all great features to have. But they should be implemented in a Sage launcher app that I recently proposed. The launcher app could also help direct you to the best download for your machine and prompt you for possible updates. 

I never liked executable installers. Everything that is wrong about software distribution on Windows in the end boils down to the use of executable installers...

[Dr. David Kirkby]

On 02/11/12 08:04 PM, Volker Braun wrote:
> Those are all great features to have. But they should be implemented in a
> Sage launcher app that I recently proposed.

I did not see that.

> I never liked executable installers. Everything that is wrong about
> software distribution on Windows in the end boils down to the use of
> executable installers...

The things I dislike about Windows have nothing to do with executable
installers. I've come across them many times on Windows and Unix systems, and
don't dislike them unless you have to start installing java and other things to
run the installer.

Google Earth, Mathematica and VirtualBox all have their installers built with
makeself on Linux.

NB.
At one point Solaris could run on machines with less RAM than the minium
specified. However, it was not possible to install it on such systems as the GUI
installer used more RAM. But it was possible to install with a lot of RAM, then
remove some RAM!

But 'makeself' is only a shell script.

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[Volker Braun]

On Saturday, February 11, 2012 12:17:42 PM UTC-8, Dr. David Kirkby wrote:

Google Earth, Mathematica and VirtualBox all have their installers built with
makeself on Linux.

VirtualBox thankfully offers rpm/deb downloads.

Google Earth usually doesn't work for me since they ship half of all required libraries but then invariably miss some. One of the few closed-source Google projects...

[Dima Pasechnik]

perhaps they should learn from Sage how to make such all-inclusive installations :-)