[Gnumed-devel] next stop: frozen boostrap, I mean frozen yogurt

[Sebastian Hilbert]

Hi all,

Back in the days when GNUmed appeared for Windows. A number of user way 
smarter then me managed to break it in unpredictable ways. Installation meant 
hit or miss. Later frozen binaries came along. They have been a huge success. 
I decided that despite my careful cecking of installed dependencies users 
would still find ways to break it. So for some time the only thing you can 
download for MS Windows is a frozen client.

Gone are the days when someone mailed in that something went wrong during 
installation of the dependencies. There simply are none anymore. One file to 
install. That is it.

Users have been happy so far and I have not heard of any complaints regarding 
the client on MS Windows.

But every story has a dark side. Now that we did not have a way to keep users 
from trying the client they started looking at local databases. Until now we 
have been hiding behind a brick wall of depedencies for the boostraper. Users 
still managed to install GNUmed server and bootstrap on Windows. A few 
releases back we started by catering for the Windows users by not asking a 
single question. We would even supply the passwords for Postgresql.

What a horrible thing to do but noone complained. However one or the other 
smart user still failed to cross our brick wall of python, mxtools and 
psycopg2 dependencies. 

Those days are now officially over. From version 0.7.4 there is only one 
single dependency - PostgreSQL. Thats is all. You want to bootstrap ? Go 
ahead. No more dependencies. After installation of GNUmed-server you are ready 
to boostrap.

This is considered a great day for our users. I am afraid that now that client 
and server installation is so dead easy nothing is holding you back from 
looking at the features of GNUmed and letting us know what you think.

There are still a few things I would like to see implemented:
- handling of previously installed PostgreSQL during installation
- status icon for PostgreSQL
- a webbased configuration file editor

Take care,
Sebastian