I agree with Uwe that your proposal is too complicated. I'm completely
on his side in terms of making the complete installation process as
simple and convenient as possible.
I'm also all in favour of the bundled approach: The installer can
include the minimal python, perl, imagemagick, etc. system, so the user
only has to install miktex and ghostscript as additional installs.
Yes, there is maintenance involved in keeping such a package up-to-date,
and it will be fragile for a while until all missing pieces have been
found, but there are lots and lots of Windows users, and some of those
are bound to help out with keeping such a package bug free and up-to-date.
Installing LyX should as be easy as 1-2-3:
0) First, in the background, detect which components exist in advance,
and use those if they are suitable without even asking the user.
1) Present a checked list with simple names of things that the installer
wants to install from the bundled lot it provides. Provide an "advanced"
button, which allows the power users to choose between cygwin and ming,
see the paths, choose the full packages instead of the small ones, and such.
2) Provide a checked list of pacakages that the installer will
automatically download and run, for the two or three other packages,
which we can not avoid inside the installer. These links point directly
to a tested executable on our ftp-server, to make sure that the links do
not become stale. Notice that it is important that this step is fully
automatic: The average user has a hard time downloading and installing a
package from, say, Sourceforge.
3) Launch LyX and be happy.
The idea is that the user should not have to make any technical choices.
Those are just mistakes waiting to happen. He just has to click Next a
bunch of times, and things will just work out of the box.
Ideally, it should be possible to run the installer in an automatic mode
that also just works. Such a mode would also be a killer in big
organisations, because then the IT department can just put that
installer in the log-in script, and be happy.
Yes, this approach has a much higher maintenance hassle: keeping the
ftp-site up to date, fixing bugs in the bundle, and what not. But it's
like what they say about math formulas in a book: Every equation in a
book halves the sales. The same principle applies here, except that it
is worse: Every technical decision reduces the number of users by a
factor of 4.
LyX is so easy to use that installation should not be a barrier.
Look at the amount of feedback on the installer you've got now (and it
hasn't even been announced anywhere): Among the thousands of
non-technical users that will jump on this, we just need five or ten
that are willing and able to lift the maintenance burden. And when they
do that, we can lure them right into the lions nest: the LyX source code!
Regards,
Asger
