At first, I apologize the delay in replying to this thread. I support
your ideas for a unified and new installer, see below:
> Also, some time ago I figured out a way to create completely
> self-contained versions of ImageMagick and Ghostscript, which are in
> the LyX program directory and only used by LyX. They don't require any
> installation or registry keys to be set and therefore work reliably,
> independent of other applications and without administrator
> privileges. This has already been included in all recent installers I
> created.
I also have this already in my installers. There were only reasons why
my installer requires admin priviledges:
- MiKTeX (no longer an issue since MiKTeX 2.8)
- system sysadmins don't allow to use programs that are not authorized.
I had much trouble in the past with the last issue. there are companies
and even universities that don't allow the users to use software that is
not authorized. I will nevertheless ignore this for the next installer
releases because LyX is free software and it is not our task to care
about company policies.
I nevertheless propose to provide an installer that allows sysadmins can
install LyX at once to all computers in their network. I already worked
on that 2 years ago but my knowledge about maintaining large Windows
computer networks is still too limited and first tests at my university
failed.
> Combining these two things, it's possible to create a very simple and
> portable LyX release. We could put all the binaries in a zip file and
> the user can extract this and immediately run LyX with all features.
> The only thing that needs to done manually is to run the installer for
> the LaTeX system and the Metafile to EPS Converter printer if desired.
> And there are the LaTeX classes bundled with LyX that would have to be
> copied to the MiKTeX directory.
No, only the Metafile to EPS printer installation would fail. Since
MiKTeX 2.8 it is possible to install LaTeX-packages without admin
permissions. Also since version 2.8, MiKTeX is fully functional when
being installed without admin privileges.
I fully agree that we should provide a portable LyX installer. The users
convinced me that this is a must-have for LyX 2.0 if we would have a
chance to spread LyX further.
> Of course the user shouldn't have to do this manually; we can also
> build a normal installer. But the point is that the installer code
> would become much more simple. We could write a script that takes the
> zip file release and converts this into a nice NSIS installer. And if
> you need to quickly edit a LyX file on somebody else's computer, the
> zip file itself is also a nice addition.
I propose to provide the portable LyX installer separately from the
"normal" installers that write things into the registry. This would ease
up the maintaining of the installers.
> Even the update installer that Uwe currently maintains manually could
> be automatically generated by comparing the new zip with the previous
> one and excluding unchanged files.
This would really be useful. But how can this be done? Do you plan to
open all files in SVN's "lib" folder in text mode and compare there if a
character was changed compared to the ones in the zip-folder of the last
released installer? I think that only this solution will work because
checking only the date of the files doesn't work as the SVN client
sometimes changes the file date on my PC although the file was not changed.
> This script can be written from scratch with all the relevant people
> involved, so finally we would have a consistent way to release Windows
> binaries. This would allow any developer to generate the official
> builds and there would be only one set of official installers.
If we write it new from scratch and everyone interested is involved, I'm
on board to use the result as official installer and will discontinue my
installer. Only this way we would be able to overcome the current
problem of the maintainability I mentioned in my previous post.
Currently I cannot maintain your current installer and I guess you
cannot maintain my installer. This state is of course not acceptable in
the long term.
We should start right now to get it ready for LyX 2.0, but I won't have
much time for this before April 26. But if you could send your first
version, I will comment on this as soon as possible and also promise to
test it.
regards Uwe
