On Monday 28 November 2005 12:52, jpff@cs.bath.ac.uk wrote:

> In the spirit of wanting a release this year I have placed a
> binary-only linux release candidate on sourceforge.  It contains an
> installer utility, and a manual.  I would like feed-back on the
> installer especially.
>  Actually there are 3 files -- floats and doubles on i386, and
> doubles on i86_64.
>  If this is an acceptable installation I will see about a Windows and
> Mac equivalent.

Having a look at the release, I noticed these issues so far:

 * the installer does not run on my system because it is dynamically
   linked against an old version of the standard C++ library that I
   do not have.
 * the interfaces ('csnd') library is missing; I think it should be
   included, even if not with all the possible languages, as it is
   intended to be part of the distribution.
 * the csoundapi~ PD object is missing.
 * the dynamic Csound API library (libcsound.so.5.1) is missing.
 * a lot of opcode libraries are included that should not be there
   as they have been merged into libstdopcod.so, for example
   libbutter.so or liboscbnk.so (there are many more). Did you do
   a clean build from up to date and consistent sources ?
   Also, what is libsft.so ?
 * the packages are very bloated (total size for floats and doubles
   is almost 50 MB, while my RPM package that also includes the PD
   and Python modules is only about 5 MB). This is mostly because of
   the utilities that are included as unstripped executables with all
   debug symbols, statically linked against the Csound library.
   While it may make some sense to release binaries that were built
   for debugging, most people would probably prefer smaller and faster
   binaries. Did you have a look at the mkpackage.py script ?
 * while I could not try the installer, does it make possible to
   cleanly uninstall Csound ? Having old files in the way is a common
   problem (such as the old plugins mentioned above).