From: lidl@rodan.UU.NET (Kurt J. Lidl)
Newsgroups: rec.games.xtank.programmer
Subject: Re: Why no binaries?
Date: 16 Aug 1992 14:12:20 -0400
Organization: AlterNet -- Falls Church, Virginia, USA
NNTP-Posting-Host: rodan.uu.net

In article <1992Aug15.215805.1702@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> wk5w@luca.bme.Virginia.EDU (William Thang Katz) writes:
>
>Greetings again, XTANK followers.  I have been off
>playing lots of netrek and losing all hope of passing
>my boards.  But I must reask you:
>
>WHY ARE THERE NO EXECUTABLE BINARIES AVAILABLE FOR XTANK?

There are.  C'mon, even experienced people like you ought to
read the FAQ every once in a while...

General Topics:
====================
08)  Is there a place that I can get binaries from?

The answer to this is, "It depends."  In general, just grabbing a
binary is not the best idea.  You should really get the source code
to the release and compile it yourself.  You will probably learn
something, and it doesn't take too long to do it.

That said, on to the topic at hand.  On occasion, binaries of Xtank
have been made available through AFS.  The current locations of the
binaries are in the following cell:

/afs/wam.umd.edu/usr20/smaug/bin

Under this directory, there are directories for sun4, mips, NeXT and
so forth.  There may or may not be binaries in those directories.  If
there is a file named "xtank", it is probably a working binary for
whatever platform the directory is named after.  These files may or
may not work for you.  Good luck.

There is at least one site that has world accessable AFS cells
available through anonymous FTP.  You might be able to get a binary
through this FTP server.  If it works, great, if it doesn't, build it
yourself.  The AFS cell that provides this service is
citi.umich.edu.  (Thanks to Jeff Rogers (rogerj@rpi.edu) for pointing
this out.)

If you take the binary via FTP from this AFS site, make sure that you
also get the current xtank distribution, because you will need to
unpack the Vehicles, Mazes, Help and Bin directories.  You don't need
the Doc directory, but it does have useful information in it.

(just checking, there are currently binaries for decstations and
sun4 machines there.)

I'm using 74% of my quota there to make things available -- that's
*only* the two binaries and the support files that are needed.  If
I had more disk quota, I'd put in a nExt version, too.  I don't have
access to hps, iris' or rs6Ks, so everyone with one of those loses.

>By the way, how is Gnat doing?

Same as before -- typically wins on faster machines,
gets the crap kicked out of it on slower machines...

>Has anyone fixed the bugs I posted on the message passing system?

No.

>Gnat is seriously hampered by losing dozens of messages at a time.

Well, there are many things that would be nice to have enough time
to do justice to.  Unfortunately, we have only got 24 hours in
each day...

-Kurt (the patch-meister)
-- 
/* Kurt J. Lidl (lidl@uunet.uu.net)   | Unix is the answer, but only if you */
/*                                    | phrase the question very carefully. */
/* Don't even think of confusing my opinions with my employer's opinions!   */
Xref: sparky rec.games.xtank.programmer:425 rec.games.xtank.play:220