Swarm on Linux

[Manor Askenazi]

Congratulations Seth!!!

I just wanted you to know that we are aware of the anguish involved in 
the installation process, and that there is at least one very important
task which is being dealt with _right_now_ to try and help out, namely,
the FAQ. As you suggested we need an FAQ which is both visible and 
informative and we are currently in the process of editing it.

In fact, Glen Ropella (a.k.a address@hidden), our latest swarm-team 
member has been going over the swarm-support mailing list and teasing
out the main stumbling points etc. So, a new FAQ will be added onto the 
Swarm web-pages in the very near future...

Regarding your comment about people giving up on Swarm due to installation
problems I can actually back your theory with some figures:

  [... since our latest (and first public) release ...]

     Downloads of libtclobjc-1.1b3.tar.gz --  294
     Members of the swarm-support list    --  106
     Members of the swarm-announce list   --  448

The number of downloads of libtclobjc gives a good estimate of the number
of attempts to actually build swarm (since libtclobjc is rarely available
on Unix installations prior to an attempt to download swarm).

The number of participants on the swarm-support list gives a pretty precise
estimate of active users (can you imagine wanting to stay on this list 
without actually developing Swarm simulations ;-)

The number of people on the swarm-announce list gives you an idea of the
number of people who would bother with swarm if it ran under Windows95 :)

So, we have lost approximately a third of the downloaders to installation
fatigue. This is a shame, but given the ratio of users to coders (106/3)
I can't say that I'm terribly upset... ;-) Besides we're still technically
in beta so I hope nobody was expecting a rose garden. Having said that, I'm 
really happy that you were able to build Swarm (to be honest, I was worried 
there for a while) and am looking forward to the bugs that you will undoubtedly
uncover in our code!

Regards,

Manor.

PS> We have never actively announced Swarm in any truly public forum (e.g. 
    newsgroups such as comp.ai.alife), and one of the reasons for this has
    been that we are trying to minimise installation-fatigue for the time 
    being...