Edwin Leuven wrote:
lyx is nearing it's first beta for the 1.5 release and we could use some
help with the installer. we were hoping you could free some time for this.
It took me a lot of time to write an installer that complies with all
the requirements of the LyX users and developers, based on information
about previous LyX installers as well as my own experience with
installer development and NSIS scripting.
The installer I wrote has a clean code base and implements features in a
better way compared to other scripts like the LyXWinInstaller. It also
provides almost all features of the LyXWinInstaller except the
unofficial modifications. I prefer to use provide an official and
unmodified LyX version and believe that changes should be discussed on
the list and implemented on all platforms. The differences that are
listed on the wiki are outdated, most of these things have already been
included in the official installer.
Although it would be easy to merge all efforts and continue with one
official installer, people never agreed about this. As the only
"official" download location for LyX/Win is a wiki and everyone is free
to upload their own installers, we still have a very confusing situation
with users having to choose between various installers. This is not only
confusing for users but also makes support difficult. Switching between
different installer code bases only makes this worse.
I would surely want to continue the installer development, but only if
everyone agrees to merge the code and go on with one official installer.
It looks like there are now two installers in SVN. Do you really think
that is a good thing?
What I suggest is:
* Start with the current official installer code base
* Everyone can add new features to the installer after discussing this
on the mailing list, just like things work with the source code of LyX
itself.
* Features of the LyXWinInstaller that are missing in the official
installer can be added directly to the official SVN code base by Uwe and
others. Of course this should also be discussed on the list.
If everyone including Uwe thinks this is a good idea we can have a
single official installer very soon. If not, I'm not going to waste any
more time on this and you'll have to figure out what to do with those
two code bases.
Best regards,
Joost Verburg
