[6482] in SIPB bug reports
Re: xmcd
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Salvatore Valente)
Fri Sep 12 20:53:00 1997
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 1997 20:52:44 -0400
To: jered@MIT.EDU
Cc: bug-sipb@MIT.EDU, mycroft@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <199709122301.TAA02410@the-great-machine.mit.edu> (message from
Jered J Floyd on Fri, 12 Sep 1997 19:01:10 -0400)
From: Salvatore Valente <svalente@MIT.EDU>
Jered wrote:
In the sipb locker reorg, xmcd seems to be lost in the shuffle.
I wouldn't say "lost", I'd say "thrown out." I heard reports that the
version in the audio locker worked better than the version in the sipb
locker, so I did not install it.
The version in sipb-old works well,
Sure, if you define "works well" as "almost never works." When I've
tried to use it, I'd estimate that: a third of the time, it failed to
find the CD-ROM, a third of the time it said "Permission denied", and
a third of the time it worked. This may have something to do with
different types of Sun hardware and different Athena releases, or it
may just be completely random. I don't know.
the version in the audio locker is older and broken,
Have you reported this to the maintainer of the audio locker? That
should be the first step.
and the version on consult is not there for all platforms.
The phrase "thrown out" comes to mind.
Could whomever originally installed it in sipb (mycroft, I
think) move it to sipb-new?
That was me. I do not think xmcd should be publicly available in more
that one place on Athena, so I won't install it in the sipb locker
unless the audio and consult locker maintainers tell me that they are
desupporting it and removing it from their lockers.
(I would, but I'm not sure if there are any odd dependencies. If the
maintainer doesn't want to, however, I will.)
There aren't odd dependancies, but it is an installation nightmare for
a lot of reasons. It stores system-specific and hardware-specific
information in the app-defaults file. It stores dozens of
platform-dependent and platform-independent files in the lib/
subdirectory. It has to be configured differently for each type of
Sun hardware out there. It has to be configured differently for each
type of PC hardware out there.
xmcd doesn't even come with RedHat. That says something about how
difficult it is to make an xmcd binary distribution work.
Thanks.
You're welcome.
-Sal.
