Am Samstag, 27. Januar 2007 16:44 schrieb Uwe Stöhr: > Bo Peng schrieb: > > > Also, in theory, lyx can function without Ghostscript and ImageMagick. > > But only in theory! LyX without Imagemagick is practically useless.
For many people, yes, but this is not true in general. I know somebody who writes a thesis in linguistics that does not contain a single image, only some diagrams produced with gastex and qtree. Imagemagick is not needed in this case at all. And I myself avoid imagemagick if possible and use the netpbm utilities instead, because they are faster and require less memory. > > Both sides have valid reasons but the lyx-developers have reached an > > agreement on how to proceed, namely the official installer's way. > > Really? When? We've discussed the installer thing some times in the past but I can't remember that > we decided this. I don't remember if all changes were agreed on, but several where. > >> What I really miss is the support: Joost for example changed the > >> lyx.exe to lyxc.exe to hide the > >> appearing command line window. This is a nice feature but nobody knows > >> it. Users asked where's the > >> debug output, why is lyx.exe so small, etc. > > > > It is common to have small starting program, and debug output is not > > supposed to be seen for normal users. > > I said that this is a nice solution but the users need to be informed. So to be a little doting: > Joost is allowed to make these unannounced changes without informing everybody, but I who wrote down > my changes and informed the list about them is every time I bring a change to the list hardly > criticized. That is not true. Joost announced this, see the thread "LyX 1.4/Windows console application" from October. He has no rights that you don't have. > I'm not willing to bring installer things to the list again. I just removed my code so do what you like. > I'll continue the documentation cleanup but will allow me to announce my installer on the users list > and the wiki and supporting it. Please don't. It will be better for everybody if you and Joost work together, not in some sort of competition. > Joost took my installer code and modified it on his own without informing me what and why he has > changed things. Then he upload it to SVN and boom: We had a new official LyX installer! > This was a real shock because I worked well together with Angus to make one new installer this time. > Of course there were some points where my installer wasn't acceptable, for example the whole code > was in one singe installer file. I changed this accordingly after I first tested out Joost's > installer but I was of course very displeased by the way the installer thing was handled. I can understand that, and I indeed noticed that too and thought that this was not nice. But I remember also that I tried to convince you (without sucess) to not ship modified toolbars, but instead try to get the modifications into the official sources. This does probably explain why Joosts installer went quickly into svn, and yours not. But this is the past, the current situation is different: You have svn access and Joost is willing to work with you on a single code base. > After Joost wasn't reachable for a longer time and bugs couldn't be fixed some users convinced me to > put my stuff to SVN. I see now that this was a bad idea, sorry again. No, this is a meta problem (and besides, Bo is not the one to decide that, this should be decided by a majority). The real problem is: We have two people working independantly on two independant installers and solving many problems twice. This is really a waste of resources, and this problem _must_ be solved IMHO. So let me please restate a proposal I made some days ago: - We wile have only one installer code base that is maintained in svn, both by you and Joost. You and Joost should come to an agreement whether this will be based on the current official installer, or on your code. This code base will be used to produce all installers. - There will be a minimal installer that does only install LyX itself and nothing else for people who have everything else already and maybe still use a modem. The size of this should be around 9 MB. This installer could of course also offer to download and install needed packages, but this should be optional. - Other installers that include more stuff will be made by you (from the same source code) as you see the need. Of course the goal should be to put as much as possible into the official installer, but if something you want does not get consensus then it would go into your version. - Modifications to LyX itself should only be made if there is a very good reason. If such modifications are made the installer should be named in such a way that it is clear that it is a modified version. The preferred way to include modifications requested or contributed by users is to discuss them on the list and put them in svn afterwards. I am pretty sure that this will be less work for you in the end. And it will be better for the project as a whole and for users if there are not two completely different installers, but if they are similar and only differ in some details. Georg
