Hi,
Slightly abridged mail I sent to Edward, who asked me to post it.
---
My experience
Having read quite a bit of information about Leo, I was extremely keen
to get it installed on my system (Ubuntu 9.04). I downloaded the
latest version (leo_4.6.2-1_all.deb) and tried to install.
* The first hurdle was an incomplete install, which I was unable
to remove or purge.
* I then took the file list from the .deb package and removed all
the top-level directories. [I know, there are better ways, but this is
what I did.]
* Thinking that maybe it's an issue with the latest, I tried to
install via the repositories, and got a complaint about some python-qt
stuff (sorry, I did not keep notes) which I had to get installed via
"apt-get -f install", which I did.
* Upon running leo, however, I received a Python usage complaint.
* Thinking that there was an issue with versioning of some support
files, I decided to get leo_4.6.1-1_all.deb and install that on top of
what I now had. Success!
* Going along with that thinking, I again installed
leo_4.6.2-1_all.deb, which now launched just fine.
At this point I decided to write this email.
My conclusion
It looks like the latest version expects stuff from previous versions
to be in place. That doesn't help someone with no previous versions. I
don't understand (nor intend to) the spaghetti which is the Debian
package management approach to figure out why the dependencies were
not sorted out.
My suggestion
Very simply, create a clean Ubuntu desktop install in a virtual
environment and keep it updated. Then when you want to test a new
release, do so against the virtual installation, but run the VM in
such a way that your installation makes no permanent changes. That
will allow you always to be sure that everyone new to Leo will be able
to use it on the latest Ubuntu (which you seem to support), and surer
than otherwise that it should work on older versions as well.
I'll end with a story: years ago I worked for one of the largest IT
companies in the world (no, not Microsoft: bigger) in their enterprise
management software business unit. A sale of this kind of software
easily ran into the millions of dollars. One of their core products
suddenly would no longer install on new machines, and the issue was
related to what I described above. A developer of this product
(possibly the poor sod packaging it for release) did not have a
particularly up-to-date machine. In fact, it was so old that the
company (which also made the hardware) no longer supported its
graphics card. Unfortunately that meant that no-one could any longer
download the driver for this card, which the packaging software marked
as required. It was so old that even Google only returned a few hits.
You have no idea how long it took to get this sorted out, and how much
money was wasted in the process. In the end, it would have been
cheaper to give the packager a newer machine (and to send him/her on
packaging training!).
I hope the above helps.
~8-)
John Botha
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