If you ask me anything older than W2k should not be supported at all. The
energy spent in these obsolte systems is better spent fixing real bugs.
I fully agree. I also wouldn't be able to support Win98 as I have no
access to a Win98 machine nor do I know someone who has it running.
We don't provide packages
for Redhat, Debian, Suse et al. We provide these people with the ability
to produce their own packages tailored to their own systems. Uwe's funky
Windows installer fills exactly the same niche for the Windows system.
I haven't seen this from this point of view. But that implies that you
see Debian, Fedora etc. as counterpart to Windows. I thought this is the
case:
Linux Windows
Suse, Debian, Win2000, WinXP
Fedora, etc.
But anyway, Windows isn't a niche as over 90% of the desktop systems use
it. To spread LyX to a wider user base we should provide a full
functional installer. Angus' installer is still too complicated for most
users; for example also in my university institute there are not many
who know what a unix shell is but many of them have written their thesis
with LyX. The idea to bundle all needed programs to one installer is not
my idea, OpenOffice.org, Abiword, etc. have also such a Windows installer.
---
Concerning the administrator privilege
Many Windows programs needs admin privileges and this for good reasons.
Not every user should be able to change registry parts that could harm
other programs. LyX itself don't need admin privileges but some other
needed programs. I think we can live with this restriction. If people
don't have admin privileges and their admin don't allow them to install
a program when they ask him there's an important reason.
---
Concerning the licenses
Jean-Marc helped me a lot by fiddling around with the licenses and I
also asked the authors of some programs to be on the safe side. Here's
what we got:
> I actually have checked the license stuff before. Let me do it again,
>
> lyx -- not a problem
>
> python -- The gist of it is that Python is absolutely free, even for
> commercial use (including resale). There is no GNU-like "copyleft"
> restriction.
>
> ImageMagick: is free software: it is delivered with full source code
> and can be freely used, copied, modified and distributed. Its license
> is compatible with the GPL.
>
> Aspell is called GNU aspell
>
> Mingw: MinGW base runtime package is uncopyrighted and placed in the
> public domain. This basically means that you can do what you want with
> the code.
>
> Miktex: To the best of our knowledge, all software in this
> distribution is freely redistributable (libre, that is, not
> necessarily gratis), within the Free Software Foundation's definition
> and Debian Free Software Guidelines.
MiKTeX is distributed under a GPLed license. I'm in contact with the
author. He kindly supports my work with fast updates and even with
special MiKTeX builds. Some new features of the upcoming MiKTeX 2.5 are
there due to discussions between us. So no problem here.
> And we are getting rid of ghostview.
No we aren't. The installer comes with GSview that is distributed under
a GPL like license (the AFPL) with the restriction that you cannot use
it when you want to burn it to a storage device (CD, DVD, etc.) to sell
it or to ship it for example with a computer magazine. In this case you
first have to ask the author to give his OK.
The same license is used for the version of Ghostscript that is included
in the installer. I can easily switch to the unrestricted GPL version of
Ghostscript and skip GSview when the installer should be delivered on a
storage device. Until somebody wants to do this, I'll leave it as it is.
AFPL Ghostscript contains some bugfixes we reported while GPL
Ghostscript is based on the code from end of 2004.
---
Concerning the Win builds
I started a new job and have therefore not that much time I had before
to work on LyX. I wrote the installer when I had a full month time to
work on it. The time you need to maintain the installer is much more
than I expected as you have to take care about bugs in the third party
programs. An example: A user reports you a problem with instant preview
and you find out that this is a bug in dvipng. Now you have to discuss
this with the author of dvipng and ask the author of MiKTeX to build a
new fixed version because dvipng needs the build environment of the
LaTeX distribution. This requires lots of emails and takes some days
until the problem is solved. This effort was the reason why I just took
Angus builds and will do so for the next releases Angus will kindly prepare.
Nevertheless I plan to upload weekly or monthly LyX 1.4SVN builds when
I'm able to compile LyX by myself. I'm working on it but there are so
many nasty things to setup my compilation environment (on WinXP-x64)
before I can start. (I tested to build LyX's Qt4 frontend and this seems
to be very easy to compile, so at least when LyX 1.5 is out build LyX
for Windows shouldn't be a problem.)
So that's what I can do to calm down the installer discussion.
best regards Uwe
