Distributing In-House Engineering Code?

caswelmo asks: "My company has recently moved from Solaris workstations to Windows workstations (Ohhh, the humanity). As an engineering focused company, we use our computers to run many in-house (command line) codes to analyze and design our products. We currently use NAS storage to store everything and use batch files and init scripts to run the correct codes over the network. This makes sure everyone is running the latest version. This also stinks. I know this isn't an original problem, so what are some other solutions for rolling out lots of simple codes like this?"

Comments

cygwin

[blackcoot]

step 1: move all that stuff into cvs / source control system of your choice.

step 2: install cygwin on all the machines (http://sources.redhat.com/)

alternately: use ms's unix system services (go digging on the m$ website) theoretically this will give you a "real unix" running inside windows.

at least this way you don't have to spend as much effort porting your old tools.

Re:cygwin

[foote]

Simon Peyton Jones, a Microsoft researcher in England who does a lot of work on Haskell (for Microsoft?), has a cheat sheet that "summarises all the things I do to make my Win2k machine more useful to me."

www.research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/win32-cheat.ht ml

It's rather funny, as much of what he does is make the system more like Unix, with tools like:

• Emacs, ispell for Emacs, Emacs tags tables
• Latex
• A good Telnet client
• Cygwin
• Services for Unix
• CVS
• GHC (Glasgow Haskell Compiler)

He describes how to set things up so he can:

• Export Postscript from a Word, Excel, or Powerpoint document
• Include LaTeX equations in Powerpoint slides
• Draw a Powerpoint/Visio picture and include it in a LaTeX document
• Convert between Word and LaTeX
• Include typeset material from Postscript into a Powerpoint slide
• Include mathematical symbols in Word documents

And more. Useful stuff in general for when you're forced to work on Win machines.