- Binaries are precompiled and therefore they are ready to run when
you've downloaded them. The installer and the zipped binaries contain
binary versions of Greenstone.

- Source code needs to be compiled up before it can be run. The source
code releases contain the code but no binaries. The person who
downloaded it will need to compile up the source code first (compiling
the code will generate the executable binaries) after which they can
then run the program.

The advantage with binaries is that you don't need the Java or C++
compilers installed on your machine in order to run Greenstone if you
are working on Windows, Linux or Mac Leopard (if this last is configured
similarly to our situation).

The advantage to having source code is that in those cases where a
binary release is not available for someone's particular system, they
can still produce a binary that will work for them by compiling up the
source code on their own machine. This will generate binaries that are
native to their machine, and (assuming the compilation succeeded without
a glitch) this will work.

Hope this wasn't too confusing,
Anupama

Thao Thao wrote:
> Hi everybody!
> i used Greenstone for build my library but I want ask "What What is the
> difference between binary and source code? "
> Thanks you!
>
>
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