On 27/09/12 1:11 AM, "Sven Barth" <[email protected]> wrote:
>This (although I'm mostly using URL completion for it...) and the >following: >* http://wiki.freepascal.org/ >* http://www.freepascal.org/docs.var >* ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/snapshot/trunk/ >* http://bugs.freepascal.org Oh, Sven, Sven, Sven I absolutely agree that those are really useful pages. But not one of them says "Download Here" (flashing the "Here", of course! :)) So, as a fairly new user, I see the first page is a load of writing (bzzzzt! No boobs or russian wife ads :(), the second has every document except how to troubleshoot an installation problem, the third just puts up a window demanding a username and password (why? How do I register? What do I get when I pass the gatekeeper's portal of doom?), and the fourth breaks in every chrome browser I have access to and shows a completely blank page. That's none for four! Please don't get me wrong, these are terrific pages to have links to on the front page, but they all need some explanation (well, maybe not the docs page). Footnotes, things like that. They can't be single-word links. They're all fantastic for knowledgeable developers, or wannabe compiler compilers (like me, I've seen all those pages in the past 4 days at some time or another), but not for new users who kinda know what a compiler is, and who've been playing with Turbo Delphi or a university installation of D2011 or similar, or -ahem- RadStudio from the Pirate Bay... Again, think new, novice user. They're probably smart enough to know how to configure their browser to download to a known location on their system (that goes without saying for linux users, but not necessarily windows or Mac users), and they should know the difference between a compiler and an ide. But not everyone is going to know or care about daily builds, patches, trunks, and fixes. They're going to say "Hey, you promised me a programming language. What's FTP got to do with it?" So far, the fpc site seems to be designed mainly to capture Eclipse users who are tired of the bloated IDE, tired of struggling with java classes, and remember pascal from uni days. And that's great, that's what you want, definitely - but the kids coming out of TAFE and university courses (at least here, in Australia) either love or hate C, and if they hate it, they'll be looking for an alternative. But they won't necessarily know what a trunk is, or even what svn is, full stop. They may be your biggest growth segment for the next few years (if not more), so you have to capture their attention, make it super easy to get the basics down on their computer, and super easy to install. So far, so good, that's what FPC and Lazarus does best, but it's *still* terribly confusing for experienced programmers to know what they have to download, then what order to install, then how to fix common problems, and so on. Either that needs to be taken care of by a universal installer (ha!), or we need to document, explain, and assist on the one page. No trunks, no wiki, no passwords, just click here, here, and here. Install this, then this, then this. Here's the examples. Here's the documentation. Here's the wiki. Don't like fpc? Fix it - here's howblah blah blah. I hope this makes sense. And I do hope everyone's taking my attitude in the spirit it's intended, I'm not trying to be a bastard, really. I know you guys can pull all this together, you really don't need me to tell you this. But I'm gonna keep having fun until I get access to the site, or you tar and feather me, and then kick me off the list! (Hint : try the first option, then you can do the second if you're not happy). :D - Pete _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - [email protected] http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
