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Re: gEDA-dev: Gschem and Cairo graphics library
On Sunday 30 July 2006 10:15, Stuart Brorson wrote:
> My challenge to those who don't like the CD is this:
>
> Please produce a single download file which installs the whole set of
> gEDA tools onto the computer of a naive user.
I've been hacking on wxPCB (native Windows version of PCB), all to slowly I'm afraid,
and my plan was to distribute the compiled .exe file(s) and instructions for running
it under an emulator like Wine. Nothing to compile at all then. I concede to
your coming point that you still need to install Wine, but most distributions
have an easy way to install that these days.
Linux will never over take the Microsoft Windows Desk Top as long as you have a
million dependencies and have to compile it to run it. Nor will it take over
the Desk Top as long as setting up an arbitrary printer model is next to impossible.
Not using the myriad of libraries that are out there, does make development
by the developers harder, since they must constantly reinvent the wheel
just to avoid dependencies, or we end up with tools that look like they
are from the Stone Age. Aesthetics are important if you are trying to convince
Management to use Open Source Tools. A good example of this from work:
We make a device with a ten year old four line/forty character display, you can
run it over with your Fire Truck (it is for the Fire Industry) and it will keep going.
Yet we constantly get complaints that it does not have a fancy graphic
display like our competitors, than you can't run a kids Tricycle over.
Guess who is getting the orders right now, us or the competitors?
As I work 12+ hour days, six days a week, working on bring new display to
market for a show this fall...
> Make it easy for the naive user
Actually I need to make it easy enough that even my current boss can
install it. I showed him PCB under Cygwin and he went running...to
hard to install.
> few clicks. And not just the gEDA/gaf stuff, but also PCB, Icarus
> Verilog, ngspice, gnucap, gerbv, etc etc etc.
Agreed. I think gerbv already will build with Mingw so it is a candidate
for running under Wine.
After the "naive user" has decided that they like gEDA et.al. then they
can tackle building it from source.
> Don't, however, make a tool which requires an internet connection,
> knowledge of Klik, or the ability to use [apt-get, yum, etc]
Isn't the Wiki for just such instructions? For each person that has
their favorite install program, whatever it may be, would you please
add some instructions to the Wiki on what to do.
Do you have room to put the Wiki on your physical CDs? I can see
why you would not want to put it on a down-loadable image,
and if you are downloading the image then you have access to
the Wiki.
> require more than basic-level Linux ability.
BSD should not be over looked, and other obscure systems,
such as http://www.pcbsd.com/ .
Which uses yet an other package manager.
> (I gotta say that I field a lot of support requests since we run the
> Free Dog meetings in Boston, and since I produced the install CD. The
> level of questions/problems we have with users has convinced me that
> folks who say "just use [apt-get, yum, etc]" simply don't get it!
> Knowledge of these tools is not as widespread as you might think!
Then we need to do better documentation as a group, rather than
discourage their usage.
> Unfortunately, prospective gEDA users are very
> frequently flummoxed by how to install gEDA, and it is important for
> us developers to be sensitive to this problem.)
I have to admit that I am "frequently flummoxed by how to install gEDA"
myself. I always forget that I need to install the GD library first if I want
PNG output to work. I install and build a lot of software and I find gEDA
in its current form the hardest. As someone else recently pointed out
why can't it be one tar.gz file with a single ./configure ?
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