On Sep 26, 2010, at 4:52 PM, Dan Davison wrote:

Hi Richard,

Richard Riley <rile...@gmail.com> writes:

Dan Davison <davi...@stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:

I think that the documentation concerning installation should be made more user-friendly. My impression is that the Org manual makes all this
sound much harder than it needs to be, and I suspect that this is an
entry-barrier for new Org users. For example, the first thing users
encounter in the manual section is an instruction to edit a Makefile.

I suggest we provide a "quick and easy installation" section to the
manual, that shows people how to start using the latest version of
Org-mode without messing about with compilation and installation (I
rarely compile and have never "installed" Org-mode). It would also be
helpful to include notes on how to find your ".emacs" file.

This would involve the following changes to section 1.2 Installation:

1. The first thing it should say would be along the lines of
  "A reasonably recent version of Org is included in Emacs. Are you
  sure you need the latest version of Org?  If not, skip to the
  Activation section and start using Org!"

I would not go that way. org moves very very quickly.

I would have it in bold letters "we thoroughly recommend taking the
latest org release from git and here is how to do it (git pull with a
label)". Then if and when issues arise they can git pull as and when the
fixes arrive.

I do understand why you say this, but these are supposed to be easy
instructions; they should not involve usage of any version control
software.

I say this because some distros (debian being the prime example) can be
very tardy with including latest versions.

Yes, I agree. The org-latest.{zip,tgz} are what should be recommended
(with the info caveat)

I think what we should recommend here is org.tar.gz and org.zip.  There
are the latest release, usually no more that 1 or 2 months old and stable. Using the ..-latest files does carry this risk of making a beginner install
a bad version.  So if we go for beginners...

- Carsten


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