On Tuesday 25 November 2008 11:41, Ian Clarke wrote: > On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 3:04 AM, Zero3 <zero3 at zerosplayground.dk> wrote: > > but assuming Linux is the future, and Linux apps ought to be packaged anyway, we only have Windows > > and Mac left, leaving less reason > > An unwarranted assumption. Even of today's visitors to > freenetproject.org, who will be heavily biased towards "geekier" > operating systems, just under 80% are Windows users (Linux is > (surprisingly) higher than Mac, 11.1% compared to 8.4%).
Not surprising at all, by now there must be more linux desktops than mac desktops; linux passed mac in terms of total installs some time back. Nextgens notes that a lot of windows users download the linux tarball; the most likely explanation is these are geeks who have a dedicated server, or are linux users spoofing the browser ID. Either way, it means geeks ... we should cultivate our relationship with geeks, but a wider audience is undoubtedly better. > > As open source fans we all want to see Linux do well on the desktop, > but we can't allow our hopes for Linux to lead to sub-optimal decision > making when it comes to maximizing Freenet's adoption. Windows *is* > the most important OS for Freenet adoption. Whether Macs or Linux > come next is up for debate, but at the very least, a simple and > elegant installation is important on all three platforms. Exactly. We need Freenet to prosper now, not in the distant future (whether that be 2 years or 20 years). > > Really what we need are dedicated maintainers for the installers on > Windows, Mac, and perhaps a few of the major Linux distros. How many mac-based devs do we have right now? How many Windows-based devs? Most devs use linux for their freenet related work. Of course most of them use Windows at work. I think p0s was using Windows...? But p0s has more important things to be getting on with than the installer. > An > installer that works on all three platforms has many advantages, but > will never be as smooth or intuitive as platform-specific installers > because people have differing expectations of each platform. For > example, Windows users tend to expect a Wizard-style installer. Mac > users expect a DMG containing an executable App that they can drag to > their Applications folder. Linux users expect to be able to use > apt-get, yum, or something else depending on their specific distro. Unless their specific distro happens to be unsupported. Which is common, because the distro market is still extremely fragmented. Hence we need a good GUI installer even for linux. No? http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8454912761.html Ubuntu (including variants): 30% SuSE: 21% Other Debian variants: 14% Fedora/Red Hat: 9% Gentoo: 7% Others: 18% /me notes that nobody I know uses SuSE ... it's much more common than redhat, and its rpm's are not strictly speaking compatible with fedora rpm's... > > The question is: how can we make it as easy as possible for these > third-party platform installer creators? The first answer is: we must > document, in a platform agnostic manner, what the installer must do to > get Freenet up and running. Third-party here means simply that they are not current devs. In which case they would be new devs. That would be great. > > Next, we must identify anything that can be improved in Freenet that > would make writing these installers easier. IMHO moving the "wizard" part into the node itself was an important step in the right direction. We could move the rest into the node by always downloading the plugins and seednodes file in the installer, and asking the user about the plugins during the post-install wizard. Ideally we'd also ask the user about auto-start in the post-install wizard (defaulting on but executing a script to turn it off if the user asks us to). > > Lastly, we could put out a high-profile appeal for people to help us > create solid intuitive platform-specific installers (assuming no > existing volunteers want to take on the task). > > Ian. In a related mail, Nextgens wrote: > Then it would require the node to have web-access and to make > web-requests after it has been set up. The current node doesn't do that > unless told to. No it doesn't. Just download (or bundle) everything, and don't use it until the user has decided whether to use it. ... > > The idea is to minimize the amount of data to download in order to both > spare bandwidth and reduce the overall installation time. It's not that important nowadays. The plugins are tiny, in general. Zero3 wrote: > Random example on top of my head is the downloading of the plugins > *during* the actual installation process, from the Freenet website. > Surely they ought to be packed into the installer next to the other > files? (The question on whether to *use* the various plugins ought to be > asked during the first-time wizard IMHO. Atm. it seems like all > installed plugins are automatically loaded?) Agreed. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 827 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20081125/6b4382c1/attachment.pgp>
