Self-Extracting ENIGMA Portable

[time-killer-games]

7zip isn't Windows-exclusive, to my knowledge it runs on Linux and Mac, too. So why do we only have a compiled 7zip installer on windows? Why do we have to compile ourselves on Linux and Mac? Is it a time issue?

[cheeseboy]

The only reason we do have a 7zip is because windows lacks a package manager. It's exists because windows sucks. Theres no use for one on any other OS.

[time-killer-games]

No I mean why do we have to compile from source manually on non-windows? Why not just have a pre-compiled, standalone Mac *.app  that opens LGM and links it to the compiler? Likewise for linux? I don't know about Mac but back when I used ENIGMA on Ubuntu before I could even run it I needed to set up a bunch of crap in the terminal, there were all these steps involved making a pain to get it running LGM and everything how it should. If we had it all built into a single Mac or Linux app like there is an exe on Windows, everyone wouldn't need to continually compile from source or fart around with the repository.

[cheeseboy]

everything is compiled on every os including windows....

[Goombert]

TKG the reason for this is because those packages you have to install on the command line are OpenGL and other things like GCC using the common package manager. Windows is the only OS which has this problem which requires us to ship binaries with it, this is commonly known as DLL hell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLL_Hell
It is because of this we don't even bother with a source code installer for Windows.

Also, there is generally no point as most Linux users know what they are doing anyway, and would actually find it quit insulting probably. However, that doesn't mean we can't create a uniform easy installer like the Windows Portable ZIP, but if we did we would continue to offer both methods of installation. I did have plans to do this and submit it to the Ubuntu Software Center but it is better to wait until the product is more complete.

[Josh @ Dreamland]

To reiterate what has already been stated (or at least attempted), the point of bundling a standalone zip on Windows is so that users don't have to scour the Internet for ENIGMA's build dependencies. On all other operating systems, these dependencies can be installed from one place.

On GNU and BSD systems, you have access to a package manager on which one line of code can install all dependencies, a second line of code can obtain ENIGMA, and a third can obtain LGM. On these platforms, we will be (in the near future) distributing packages that do all of this for you via your package manager.

On Mac, the XCode installer comes with all ENIGMA's dependencies, as would be expected—the installer is in the "multiple gigabytes" size range.


So on Linux, we will be distributing packages sooner or later, but this package will be under a megabyte in size and will instruct the package manager on how to obtain all dependencies. On Apple, it's not legal for us to redistribute XCode, and tacky to try to use anything else, so we are sticking with the XCode install followed by regular checkout. On Windows, the installer's the best we can do until such a time as, eg, MinGW-get is operational, or we support codegen to some intermediate format (eg, LLVM or CIL). The latter is not scheduled to happen very promptly, and the former has been a rumor for years.

[time-killer-games]

Thank you everyone for the replies. I understand now why it is the way it is. It's no big deal.