Hello, Some suggestions and personal (devil's advocate) thoughts expressed as a list. (comments are welcome of course).
Since a release is on the horizon, - First the install.rst file mentioned in another thread (https://www.math.uni.wroc.pl/~hebisch/fricas/install.rst) is totally source (Git) oriented. It is more a build and install file rather than an install file. I think the user should be able to know where to find the binary files and how to install it. It belongs to an install file to me. (New) user should be able to quickly try FriCAS if he just wants to test it for example. I did that a lot for computer software when I was young , now I do that for iOS or Android applications. Only commentaries do not really help me intrinsically. And often I quickly delete the application if it does not fit my needs. So how about adding to the FriCAS web site a "Getting Started" like page? Like this one for example: https://www.sbcl.org/getting.html >From my point of view, the Internet is highly time consuming, moreover now with the RGPD and cookies related reglementations (this is not related here), so helping stuff is always appreciated. - What about updating the FriCAS website which mention in https://fricas.github.io/download.html FriCAS (1.3.6) - Personal though again, when I download a binary or a source tarball I sometimes forget to create a dedicated directory in my Tmp directory and I always fear when I unpack the tarball this creates several directories like bin/ doc/ share/ lib/ etc. When this happens I fulminate. For the FriCAS binaries it is not really a problem since only a usr/ directory is created and its local/ tree in it. I can know that since this is explained in Notes-1.3.8.txt in the SourceForge download page though. See below about this. Personally I prefer when I unpack a tarball, say fricas-1.3.8-amd64.tar.bz2, to obtain a directory named fricas-1.3.8-amd64 with the usr/ directory in it. That way I can, if necessary, just read/edit a file for example. See below about this. - The binary release tarball is just a usr/ directory, what about adding a simple README file and an install.sh file like this one for example: https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/blob/master/install.sh It's a SBCL example again but there are other examples on the Internet. The README file can quickly explain the use of the install.sh file. That would allow users to have different options to install FriCAS. The end user may want to install FriCAS in the $HOME/.local directory as it's usual now. - About the download page from the FriCAS website at SourceForge, there is a Notes-1.3.8.txt that explains the purpose of each file available for download and gives a link to http://fricas.sourceforge.net/doc/INSTALL-bin.txt which explains the installation instruction for the binary tarball. But the Notes-1.3.8.txt from the download page is not readable as is. Personally I had to download it and open it in a file manager. So, again, I think, a Getting started guide makes sense to quickly give minimal informations. The INSTALL-bin.txt is readable with the browser though. - What about uniformizing the FriCAS web pages from sourceforge.net and from fricas.github.io <https://fricas.github.io/download.html> . The latter comes from Wikipedia, the former from my search engine. That's all I'm thinking of. Now, I must say: first do not take this mail as personal criticism or criticize to criticize, it is just to give some thoughts. In fact, personally, I use Git and build softwares that imports to me. That way if I need access to the source code I have it under the hand with eventually IntelliSense, code browsing etc. This mail is just some ideas for _quick_ access to FriCAS without spending too much time understanding how to install/use it. And if some of what is stated here already exists I apologize in advance for what I am not aware of. And, last but not least, I must say, yes I am a relatively impatient guy :) Regards, __ Greg Le mer. 28 juin 2023 à 03:10, Waldek Hebisch <[email protected]> a écrit : > Part about dependencies of documentation build does not mention > Imagemagick and 'convert' issue, but this is needed for successful > build of the book. > -- > Waldek Hebisch > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "FriCAS - computer algebra system" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/fricas-devel/ZJuIlj%2Bjgp55q3XX%40fricas.math.uni.wroc.pl > . > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "FriCAS - computer algebra system" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/fricas-devel/CAHnU2daTAw6%3DwH3tXg_Qm1R5aGo3ArQUHVqi379qnyPOoHRiFg%40mail.gmail.com.
