Am 29.03.2014 10:48, schrieb Vincent van Ravesteijn:
This sounds like nonsense that installing 2.0.7 over 2.0.6 is ok, but installing over 2.0.7 suddenly leads to problems.
Well, when you need to install LyX 2.0.7 over LyX 2.0.7 you apparently have a problem with LyX - otherwise you would not need to do that, right? In the past when this was allowed problems weren't resolved bot sometimes only the registry was mangled even more, but see also below.
I don't like the style of your answers. You explain me what the registry is and how I can clean it up. Do you think I don't know this myself and do you think that this is slightly relevant to the issue ?
I don't understand. You asked me if a PC can get in a state there LyX cannot be installed anymore. I answered what can be done in any case. So what is wrong when I answer to your questions as I understood the question? I even asked you if everything in your mail was meant for real or ironic because I was unsure.
However, the problem you encountered is due to the beta builds I guess. The installer for the betas were not adopted specially so that I could not provide the feature that installing beta 2 over beta 1 etc. is possible. This is mainly because I simply don't have the time to maintain also beta releases but also because betas can contain bugs (e.g. in configure.py leading to perhaps broken preferences). So assuring that installing over each other will always lead to a case where one does not see bugs of the previous beta cannot be guaranteed (and checking that would cost me a lot of time I don't have).
In the meantime you say twice that there might be problems and there are reasons to disallow LyX to install over the first version. Please tell me then what these problems are.
I cannot remember the precise reasons because it is too long ago (was added when I dropped the "update installer" that I once provided I think). I remember a discussion about this with Joost and user complaints. But the main reason is what I wrote above: If a user thinks that it is necessary to install the same stable release over itself, he has a problem with the release. We cannot know what problem he might have: Many error reports I got showed that the user registry was mangled (for example HKCR was not in sync with HKLM so that e.g. *.lyx files were not opened with LyX but with notepad (Windows default backup for text files). In these cases only a re-installation will help (you might have noticed that the uninstaller handles some registry settings that are not directly added by LyX but by Windows automatically). This way you get a clean registry and issues like my example are solved afterwards. Other error reports have something to do how third-party programs were found. By installing over itself you will still suffer from e.g. invalid paths in PATH_prefix in the preferences. Also in these cases only a re-installation (where you also delete the preferences) will help.
So despite that I cannot remember the special use case and technical reason that once lead to the feature not to allow to install stable releases over each other, I think it is very clever. It might sound inconvenient but in many cases the re-installation fixes the problem that lead a user to the action to try to install over the same stable release. (Note that installing over other minor releases is and was always allowed.)
regards Uwe
