2011-03-11 03:13, Erik Trimble skrev:
On 3/10/2011 5:14 PM, David Holmes wrote:
Dr Andrew John Hughes said the following on 03/11/11 10:57:
On 06:40 Fri 11 Mar , David Holmes wrote:
Stepping up a level, an initial download of openjdk need not involve
using mercurial at all. You can simply download a stable snapshot as a
tar file;
This makes much more sense as a starting point for new users over having
to handle Mercurial and checkouts. It works fine if you just want to
_use_
the latest and greatest, not hack on it.
Even if you want to hack you can still do your initial download this
way. The hg commands only come into play when you want to update
things later.
or download an install script that will do whatever is
necessary behind the scenes to get a complete openjdk.
I don't know how that would work. I guess IcedTea comes close to this
idea
in that it detects the needed settings for the build, rather than
them all
having to be passed as make variables.
I was thinking of a simple installer as used by various bits of
software. For example for Linux you might download a script that
simply contains the initial set of hg commands needed to get the
forest. On windows it might automate downloading a tarball and
extracting it.
No matter how we structure the end JDK "forest" (and, I'm using forest
in the generic term, not to infer use of the forest extension), I think
it would be a good idea to have a top-level clone script that people can
download for "one-click" usage.
Inside that script, we can do interesting things - say, like download a
pre-built tarball of the whole Hg repo, then refresh it. All sorts of
interesting tricks become available if we go the route of encapsulating
all the implementation details in a single script, and hide those
details from the end-user. They then end up with a stable interface to
doing common tasks.
Some people would consider getting the source code a common task and "hg
clone" a stable interface for doing that.
Woho for stable interfaces for doing common tasks :-).
Regards //Johan
