Dear LyXers, I have been away for some months because of health problems, new job etc. but also because I don't use LyX anymore since a while because all documents I have to work with need collaborative access. And others don't like to collaborate with me with LyX but with Office365 and the like. (Personally I switched to LibreOffice because I can then convert to .docx if even .odt is not allowed in a project.)
Meanwhile I got frequent requests to provide a new installer because there are problems. Today I found time and indeed there are different issues that I will try to fix. As first step I updated all libraries and commit some uncontroversial things. The good news is that with the current MiKTeX there is no longer a need to update the MiKTeX update mechanism, since all users will already have it. Unfortunately MiKTeX is crashing during the run of LyX's configure script under some circumstances. Then the users will get a non-functional LyX. I reported this already. A problem is that convertDefault.py fails under Python 3, see my last post. Another problem is that InstantPreview fails with Python 3 and I cannot figure out why, see my next post. A minor issue is that the EmbeddedObjects manual can currently not be compiled because of a bug in a LaTeX package. I reported this already. Another minor thing s that the UserGuide that comes with 2.3.2 has change tracking on. This should not happen. I'll merge these changes to the other UserGuide files as I have done for years. After that I won't have time to work on the LyX docs. Now the controversial part: In the installer I see that you removed support for MiKTeX. You require now that the users have enough knowledge to set up MiKTeX in advance before installing MiKTeX. This is not the case, especially not for newbies. Moreover you removed code that setup MiKTeX for LyX. That is something I cannot accept because then LyX is not fully functional. Users need a lot of knowledge to get then all features to work. I also see that there is not much maintenance for the installer. The libraries, dictionaries, download mirror etc. need care. I started some update action today. However, I still follow the track that users deserve a LyX installation that does not require background knowledge before they start using LyX. For the first installation everything must work out of the box. And this does not work for the installer I can download from lyx.org. I don't want to fight again. It hurt me the last time a lot that devs who don't use LyX under Windows for production/daily told me what should be right for average Windows users and that the actions the installer did successfully for about 10 years should not be done anymore to suit the needs of expert users. Since we could not find consensus I went away. regards Uwe
