Re: Installer Revisited

[Tom Chiverton]

You can have multiple different JDK versions at once can't you ? Even on 
Windows ?

I didn't think we were suggesting not having a GUI installer for the 
SDK, just that under the hood it would call an ant task ?

Tom

On 17/12/2013 14:46, Nicholas Kwiatkowski wrote:
Sure, having Java installed is pretty standard now-a-days, but the bigger
question is -- which Java?  My development machine at work is locked to the
1.5 JDK as the default because they use some crazy Oracle Forms app.  This
is the same with the other 25 developers in my division.

This means installing ant and getting it to work right is a constant game
of 'wack-a-mole' as far as JDK versions.

All in all, I'm in favor of keeping the AIR installer.  Maybe we supply an
ANT script for the linux folks but I like the feeling of the
eat-your-own-dogfood installer. Not only does it remove a whole lot of
hurdles (remember before we had the installer, and all the crazy steps our
newbies had to follow in order to even download the full SDK?), but it is
clean, easy to use and works very well.  Just supplying an ANT script is
fine for the hard-core developers, but we will lose out too all the folks
that want a true 1-click install (the type Adobe used to provide).

-Nick


On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 4:43 PM, Maurice Amsellem <
maurice.amsel...@systar.com> wrote:

I don't think we can expect Java to be installed on our end user machines.
On end-users machines, no.
But I would expect the Installer / SDK to be installed by developers, not
"end-users".
Having Java installed on a developer machine is almost a requirement
nowadays, whatever language you are working with.

Don't you think so?

Maurice

-----Message d'origine-----
De : omup...@gmail.com [mailto:omup...@gmail.com] De la part de OmPrakash
Muppirala
Envoyé : lundi 16 décembre 2013 20:15
À : dev@flex.apache.org
Objet : Re: Installer Revisited

On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 10:03 AM, Alex Harui <aha...@adobe.com> wrote:

That's interesting.

On Mac, folks are given a dmg file that essentially installs the
installer and I don't believe it requires that AIR is already
installed.  Or am I wrong about that?

Yes, no need for an AIR install.  The installer has the runtime packaged
with it.


On Linux, you're saying the package we create still requires a
separate install of AIR?

I'm not a huge fan of the "install the installer" experience.  I don't
know if there is an alternative when using AIR.  That's one reason why
I'm hoping to leverage the installer to be able to install other
Apache Flex stuff (and maybe other stuff as well).  It looks like
node.js has a package manager that sort of does the same thing.  So
does cygwin setup on Windows.

The way the Installer was designed was to minimize the number of updates,
but rather to drive all the actions via the config xml as much as possible.
  In that spirit, driving it off of an Ant (ish) xml file makes much more
sense.

A lot of software does the 'install the installer' these days.  As long as
it is a one click process (which our Installer is), we should'nt worry
about it too much, IMHO.


But having to install AIR separately on Linux would be annoying.

On Linux, we can probably assume that Ant is already installed, or just a
'yum install' away from being available.  That way, they can just use the
ant script just as well.


Can we
count on Java being on every OS?  I heard it isn't on WinXP.  Do we
need to support that?

I don't think we can expect Java to be installed on our end user machines.

Thanks,
Om


-Alex

On 12/16/13 2:49 AM, "Tom Chiverton" <t...@extravision.com> wrote:

On 16/12/2013 10:44, Maurice Amsellem wrote:
AIR isn't required for*using*  the SDK one it is built, right ?
Do you mean AIR runtime, or AIR SDK ?

Maurice
AIR the runtime.
Assuming I don't target an AIR application, then I suppose the AIR
SDK is required, but this is installed by the installer.

Tom

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