binary installations that can transition into source installations

[StefanKarpinski]

I find it disconcerting to help people that have binary installations of Julia:

1. things aren't where I'm used to them being;
2. there's always stuff that seems to be missing from the setup;
3. the only way to get an updated version is to install a source version from scratch.

The primary reason to use a binary install seems to be to avoid the long time it takes to download and compile LLVM, OpenBLAS, etc. Would it be possible to have a binary installs that are essentially just source installs with all those things pre-compiled? That way you could find where the thing is installed and just run git pull and get a the latest version and even start making contributions. Seems like it would be the best of both worlds if it's at all possible. I think this would alleviate the pressure to keep binaries up-to-date massively too.

[stevengj]

The primary reason to have a binary install is that Mac and Windows systems don't come with compilers, git, or even make.

[StefanKarpinski]

Right, so the idea would be to have a binary install that can work without all of those things, but if they exist already or are provided later, can smoothly become a source install that just happened to be precompiled. I'm not even sure if this is possible, but it would be the ideal installation method.

[staticfloat]

In the case of OSX and Windows, I think this is possible. You'd essentially just need to ship the Makefiles in the proper positions, and typing make should pretty much "just work", as far as I can tell. Our Makefiles download everything, compile them, etc.....

On Linux, since things are installed into the /usr/local/ prefix and such, I don't think this is possible.

A much better idea, in my opinion, would be to allow Julia to update itself. We already package binaries for a multitude of platforms, it shouldn't be too difficult to write some unpacking code and get an in-place update. Especially on Windows and Mac, a C compiler toolchain is not a given.

I have a large amount of work to burn through after my absence the last week and a half, but this sounds like a fun project for me to tackle eventually.

[StefanKarpinski]

The traditional UNIX software installation model is so broken. It just needs to die. Scattering little fragments of every pieces of software all across the system is nuts. That said, on Linux, we can just recommend installing from source but also provide packages for the standard package managers.

[vtjnash]

This sounds cool, but possibly quite impractical. Essentially though, if the user had the rest if the compiler environment, they could do 'make USE_SYSTEM_ALL=1' after extracting the binaries to 'julia/usr'

If you want in place updates, then I could just drop git from the binaries again and pretty much just have you extract over the old one. (This would reduce the windows binary download from 35MB to 25MB, IIRC)