[Openmcl-devel] Launcher script should guess the architecture

[Gary Byers]

The manual suggests that people who can run a 64-bit version and don't
care about running the 32-bit version might want to just rename the "ccl64"
shell script.

I'd guess that the original poster is right in suggesting that newcomers find
this confusing, but I think that that may be because people from different
backgrounds have different levels of comfort/familarity with using the shell
("copy this file to a directory that's on your shell's search path" may be a 
simple thing for some people and a big mystery for others.)

I don't have a good sense for what things newcomers find confusing (as
far as I can tell, it depends on the newcomer and everyone can be
confused about things that most other people aren't.)  I'm really
skeptical that the fact that there are two shell scripts instead of
one has much of an effect on this: that seems like a simple concept
to understand (even if "use chmod to ensure that the file is executable"
isn't.)

If a single script defaulted to selecting the 64-bit version if it looked
like the OS allowed that, that script would need some way of overriding
the default (a "-32" arg or something like that.)  It's not clear that
being able to say:

ccl
ccl -32

is a whole lot better or worse than the status quo (or that installing and 
editing one shell script in /usr/local/bin is preferable or significantly
simpler than doing that twice is.)  This is all a relatively minor thing,
but I'd feel a lot more enthused about changing the documentation, changing
my habits, and asking people to change theirs than I do if I thought that
the proposed change was significnantly better (for somebody) than the status
quo, and at this point I just don't see that.

On Thu, 23 Jun 2011, Raffael Cavallaro wrote:

>
> On Jun 23, 2011, at 8:48 PM, Leo wrote:
>
>> It is not unreasonable to assume that most of the time they want 64 on
>> 64-bit machine.
>
> In any event, all of this is easily customized by either editing or renaming the scripts, using an alias in your .bash_profile, using a symlink, etc.
>
> warmest regards,
>
> Ralph
>
>
>
>
> Raffael Cavallaro
> raffaelcavallaro at me.com
>
>
>
>
>
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