[Openmcl-devel] "Binary" distributions

[Peter Seibel]

Okay, now that I've gone back and read the web pages more carefully I
understand what's going on.

But let me offer a bit of friendly kibitzing: the use of the word
"binary" to describe OpenMCL's binary archives is confusing to
simple-minded people like me who have learned that when things are
distributed in both source and binary form, the binary one is the one
for end users who don't care about rebuilding from scratch, i.e. the
one you can just grab and get up and running.

On my way to trying out Bosco 0.5 I installed openmcl-0.14.1-p1. My
first attempt was to grab the binary distribution which of course
didn't work because none of the libraries such as OBJC-SUPPORT are
available. Eventually I struggled my way through by tracking down the
*module-search-path* and making symlinks from the directory where I
had unpacked the binary distribution to my cvs tree. Which is of
course totally going around my elbow to get to my thumb. (I also got
hung up by the lack of interface database. But I've done that enough
times that I at least recognize the problem now and say, "oh yeah,
I've got to go grab the interface distribution too.")

Anyway, I'm perfectly happy with OpenMCL--my attempts to connect to
QuickTime are going great and I've got the beginnings of a
ear-training program going. Now I just need to learn enough about
Cocoa programming to put a whizzy gui on it. And now that I understand
how things work, the next time I download a new release I'll probably
not have quite so much trouble.

But I thought you might want to know about the present-day user
experience for someone who's not yet deeply immersed in the OpenMCL
Way.

-Peter

-- 
Peter Seibel                                      peter at javamonkey.com

         Lisp is the red pill. -- John Fraser, comp.lang.lisp