On 1/26/07, Uwe Stöhr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm trying to answer to some of the statememts in this thread:
Thanks.
It was surely my fault that I modified the appearance of LyX in my installer in the past, but this is now no longer the case.
Great.
Joost doesn't deliver the Ghostscript and ImageMagick files, his installer will download and install the programs separately. This has some disadvantages: The users need to download more stuff than needed, because we don't need for example all ImageMagick files. So in the end the user has downloaded more bytes than with my solution (but this isn't that important in these times).
Download size is not that important, and having full installations can give users a peace of mind. Also, in theory, lyx can function without Ghostscript and ImageMagick.
More important is the support: I started the installer without having the needed programs included but this lead to lots of unnecessary bug reports. ....< ignored> version together with the new LyX version.
Why can not we download a certain version of imagemagick from sourceforge? It might not be necessary but we can give users options to download 1. last known old but tested version of imagemagick (default) 2. the newest version of it 3. if IM exists but is different from what user choice (1 or 2), ask user if he wants to re-download and override it. This sounds a bit complicated but is IMHO better than bundling. You see, in this way, you only need to update several lines to update IM, and IM files is not needed to build a windows installer.
With Joost's method the separately installed IM remains on the system and isn't updated,
This is my proposed 3. (Is it difficult to check the version of IM?)
the uninstaller also don't ask the user to remove IM together with LyX.
I guess this is easy to do. Let us mark this as a bug report for the official installer.
When a user has a previous installed IM I don't touch it, so the included IM is only used when nothing was found.
This is 3.
Another aspect is the redundancy: I'm not anymore a fan of downloading all needed things on demand. I often had the case that one of the FTP-servers were down or whatever and I got bug reports about this. As I explainded before, the overall download size is the same, if you include it or not, but including can reduce the size and assures that actual and tested versions are used by the LyXers.
Both sides have valid reasons but the lyx-developers have reached an agreement on how to proceed, namely the official installer's way. If you step back a little bit, you will find that the other option is not so unacceptable.
The programs delivered with this are completely independent from LyX, we don't need to take care about them so I don't understand the resentments.
Why can not they be added as optional downloads? I am worrying about maintenance and license issues. It is much easier to change a link than bundling a new version of something, but not bundling them directly keeps us away from potential license troubles. My solution would be pages like: Jabref is blah blah and blah. It is used blah blah. Then an option to download it.
I'm not joking but after some of these emails I added a link to uninstall LyX in the start menu below the link to the lyx.exe.)
This is semi-standard. I see half of my problems do this.
What I really miss is the support: Joost for example changed the lyx.exe to lyxc.exe to hide the appearing command line window. This is a nice feature but nobody knows it. Users asked where's the debug output, why is lyx.exe so small, etc.
It is common to have small starting program, and debug output is not supposed to be seen for normal users.
Another example: We discussed last week how to get rid of the lyx.bat file and now Joost wrote me that he did this already - fine but how and when, and why does nobody know this? Users might perhaps have problems with this, ask on the list but we couldn't answer them.
I was also surprised but he did say a while ago that he was working on this. I did not know when he finished this though.
I'm not speaking against Joost, I really appreciate his work, he pushed us a huge step forward with his work on Aspell, Aiksaurus, etc. Create an installer that you want but support it! I'll remove my code ASAP from SVN, sorry that my doing provoke this debate.
So you still want to keep your installer instead of 1. list the things you consider missing in the official installer 2. discuss with us what would be the best way to go 3. work with Joost to implement them The whole lyx community will benefit from a single installer and I will certainly appreciate your willingness to work on an unfamiliar code base. Please reconsider your decision because it causes confusion among lyx users, make Joost unwilling to work on the official one.
> You mean you turn on miktex/update-on-the-fly for users? This is > another example of maintenance burden of third-party applications. > What if a new version of miktex is released? Do you use MiKTeX? The feature was partly build in for our needs. What's the problem? The installer supports MiKTeX 2.4 (that also has this feature in a slightly different way) as well as MiKTeX 2.5. I worked together with the MiKTeX developer to fine tune this feature and it is ready since MiKTeX 2.5.
I do hope this miktex feature can work better and appreciate your work.
> Also, there is no way to guarantee that your bundled > file will work as expected. The bundled file can be used if you have no access to the internet but want to use all packages LyX supports. And of course it is guaranteed that it works.
What I meant is something like: lyx bundle X.1 miktex has Y.1 miktex upgraded to Y.2 that requires X.2 I mean, it is OK to bundle things are not in miktex (like dvipost), but not things are already in there, because the benefit/maintenance cost ratio is too small.
> Again, make them available for all platforms or none. This is already the case but they have to be registered to MiKTeX that people can use them with LyX. You find many questions about this in the users list "document class cv not found", etc.
I had this idea a long time ago, why can not lyx set TEXINPUT internally being system TEXINPUT + lyx's own tex repository?
From the questions above it seems to me that not everybody who criticize me is using LyX with MiKTeX and have never tested my installer. I don't think it's fair to judge something you haven't tested.
I have tested both installers. It is true that I very rarely use miktex since I rarely use windows. Bo
