Am 21.03.2014 09:25, schrieb Vincent van Ravesteijn:
Having multiple versions of LyX should rather be special usecase than the normal one, but anyway.
Oh, I would say that many users have 2 installations side by side and I can understand that. If you use LyX for large and/or important documents you want to be sure that the new version is as stable as the old one so running 2 major LyX version side by side for some months is the logical solution. (Also I did this while writing my thesis and my colleagues also did.)
> You never thought about copying the LyX2.0
user preferences to LyX2.1 when installing ? If not, do you expect people to customize LyX all over again every time (ok not so often, but you used to have the opinion that all minor releases should be independent of each other).?
After some discussion we agreed that the minor version do not stand independently side by side. So in fact you only need to set the preferences once for every major release. That is once every 2 to 3 years. If you later reinstall LyX you can set the option in the uninstaller to keep your preferences. Not copying the preferences has the advantage that you will always start with a system that works. I have seen so many strange preferences like for example modified LyX PATHs. Some users uninstall LyX but opt to keep the preferences but don't install LyX again for some time. (Because they were not confident with it or whatever.) When we release a new major version, some give LyX another try and if we copy the preferences we could then start with a non-functional LyX. (For example if the LyX PATH contains paths that no longer exist.) So copying the preferences is in my opinion much too dangerous and I have not got a single complain that new major releases start with a default setting. In most cases you only need to load an existing document and say that this should be the default for all new documents and you are ready.
Wouldn't it be ok, to have the instaler ask: "Do you want to copy your preferences of the already installed LyX ?"
We should not focus on experts. If LyX should be interesting for a wide range of PC users, the installer must be click, click OK and then you get your program. (We already have more expert-features than I like in the installer.) However, in this case the question would not help us because 99% of the users would just click OK or Yes, but then we can run into problems as I described above. Note that not everybody understands what "preferences" means and especially when you have traces of older LyX on your system and you are not aware of that, the question is very confusing. For new installation the question makes no sense and but checking if and where preferences exist is very complicated.
And what about multi-user PCs? Take for example a typical case where only the admin installs programs (the standard in most companies and some universities) then the admin Windows account don't have a LyX preference because he never started it. But the PC has e.g. 3 users with different LyX preferences. Which one should the installer copy if the admin opts to? What is if one user once tried LyX has preferences only as traces because he did not use LyX anymore. How can we know that and don't use this for the other users of the PC? The longer I think about that the more I am confident that this feature is technically almost impossible and opens Pandora's box in terms of how many problems we could introduce.
regards Uwe
