On Mon, 18 Jun 2007, Rafael Maguiña wrote:
First of all, thanks for giving us the feedback!
I assume you're rather computer savvy. Would you say above average (for a
Windows user)?
Installing:
I chose the bundle on purpose, as I knew the machine on which I wanted
to install lyx isn't connected to the internet. I have to praise you for
your work on the installer: it has and installs everything needed
(miktex, ghostscript, imagemagick, etc.) in a mostly automated
manner---very well thought out. (I still have to test the
uninstallation, but if everything goes well and my girlfriend is
comfortable with lyx, I won't have to ;-)
After installing and upon running lyx for the first time, miktex tried
to install some packages from the net.
This has been discussed before but I'm not up to speed on the topic. I
hope others will chime in with pros and cons for bundling LaTeX packages.
Imagine my surprise, as I thought everything I would ever need for
running lyx should already be there.
This obviously needs to be clarfied. Did you look at any kind of
documentation or description of the installer before chosing the bundled
version? If so, would you mind looking again and say if you think there's
an obvious place to put this 'caveat'? (I could add such an information,
but I'd like to add it in a place where the user actually looks... :-)
I have 2 quirks here: 1) some packages I needed weren't in the bundle,
which I would rather recommend to include; 2) miktex wanted to install
some extra packages which I can't imagine I will ever need nor can
imagine that lyx needs them to run.
The reason for why MikTeX wants/needs to go online should probably be
added and explained. I don't know why, but others will probably tell us.
Dictionaries:
My suggestion here is as follows: I don't know how much space in MB all
the dictionaries would take, but since the bundle weighs already 75+ MB,
weren't it useful to pack them all in the bundle too?
All the dictionary installers sum up to around 30-60 MB, so at worst it
would almost double the size.
Joost/Uwe, can you confirm that a user can manually run a dictionary
installer? If this is the case, then we could see about adding
instructions for the user of a bundled installer to also download the
relevant dictionary installers.
Another alternative might be to provide a single archive with all the
installers (30-60 MB). Or possibly a single installer that installs all
dictionaries that we have... It's way overkill, but maybe more convenient
than running 4-5 dictionary installers manually.
Uwe, does your complete installer contain dictionaries as well?
If that's the case, Rafael might simply have been better off using that
installer... Perhaps that's even the case with the MikTeX packages, I
don't know.
Rafael, did you look at the "alternative" installer?
MikTeX:
<snip>
Why this is needed in order to just run lyx escapes my
understanding.
What's not obvious is that these aren't needed. I believe it's ok for
MikTeX to fail to install these, and LyX will still run. Please correct me
if this wasn't the case for you.
just for lyx to run. I know of the xforms-version, but if I understand
correctly, future versions of lyx will be qt only, isn't it?
Yes, xforms is "dead". I'm afraid you will have to install Qt libraries as
well.
Best regards,
/Christian
--
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44 http://www.md.kth.se/~chr
