[859] in Release_7.7_team
fancy SGI software and the release...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mike Barker)
Tue Feb 11 17:24:51 1997
To: release-team@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 1997 17:24:45 EST
From: Mike Barker <mbarker@MIT.EDU>
this is the message from alex about SGI "stuff". we discussed this
today in the meeting.
mike
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From: alexp@MIT.EDU
Received: by dit.MIT.EDU (5.x/4.7) id AA21019; Wed, 5 Feb 1997 19:34:46 -0500
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To: mbarker@MIT.EDU, wdc@MIT.EDU
Cc: alexp@MIT.EDU, nschmidt@MIT.EDU, facdev@MIT.EDU
Subject: fancy SGI software and the release...
Date: Wed, 05 Feb 1997 19:34:46 EST
Hi all,
I've been having some lingering concerns relating to fancy SGI
software that certain faculty members seem to be enamored of. This
came to the foreground today as I attempted (unsuccessfully, so far)
to install the Cosmo Code VRML viewer in Netscape for a Faculty member.
The issue is that a lot of this stuff installs just fine with SGI's
inst, if you have a stack of CDs handy and do a local install (often
with a couple of patches for good measure). It's hard (and often
impossible) to do this "after the fact" into a running Athena release,
due to the complex package interdependencies and patches.
I realize that there is no magic solution here, but I'm wondering if
anyone is worrying about this for the next significant SGI release-
what should happen (IMHO) is that we should "load up" a reference
machine with the latest Varsity Pack available, the latest Inventor
Libraries/whatever, the latest Java Development Kit, and the latest
Cosmo Code VRML stuff that runs on IRIX 5.3- both the viewer and the
Development Kit- all of these have been specifically requested, and
some other things as well.
If the total size for all of this is too big to be manageable, we will
have to decide what to leave out.
Is anyone doing anything about this? vrt (and dkk) used to do whatever
was needed and I have no idea if anyone has picked this up.
There is an incentive to do this as late in the release cycle as
possible, to incorporate the latest fixes and other applications
we may get asked to include later... but I don't have a sense of
when cutoff dates are as I haven't been directly involved with the
release (not that I want to be! :-)
Anyway, somebody should be thinking about this...
Alex
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