Most of the things I normally compile for unix involves "configure, make, make install" with the occasional sprinkling of "make test" for good measure. That's pretty typical. Then there are the more complex packages that actually require reading instructions before you can compile them, sure.. reading is good for you. But why, in the name of all that is holy, would you include installation instructions in an html document for something that needs to be compiled on a command line? Especially when it's *just text*. I don't care about pretty gifs and paragraph formatting! I just want to compile and install!
Damnit.
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I'm glad someone other than me has this thought as well. I have _never_ understood why people do this.
Long live the .txt doc files.
lynx -dump install.html > INSTALL
#Remote Sun server w/o lynx and w/o a web server..
There's no reason to write installation instructions as HTML in most cases.
#I *hate* when people do this. It's one of my top 5 source code peeves. The other big one for me is when tar files don't untar into their own directory.
I can relate to both the HTML and the piece of trash !@!%# not-untaring in its own directory crap. That just makes me want to rip my hair out (whats left of it).
I always find that i'm using the magical awk, and xargs combo to just delete them when that happens though, so no big deal. Anybody with a hint of intelligence can get around it.
tar -tvzf filename.tar.gz (replace z with j for bzip2) should give you a good idea of whats in the file before you untar it though. I always do that if i'm suspicious.
(Disclaimer: Note this comment was written without sleep)
#generally do not use -v with -t for tar.
and if an archive doesn't extract into its own directory, i generally recreate it just in case i need to extract again later.
Isn't the standard to include a README and an INSTALL file, in plain old ASCII, detailing what you need to know to get something installed?
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