Re: [XBoard-devel] WinBoard installer

[Tim Mann]

I've been too out of touch to have detailed comments on H.G.'s message;
I'm not familiar with most of the programs he mentions.

I would just like to put in a plug for keeping things simple and fairly
small by default.  I think the "simple" install should include one
decent engine, timestamp, and timeseal (and little or nothing else),
and the download should include only those things.  Disks are big but
some people still have slow internet connections.  Also, I think people
who just want to do simple things (not engine collectors) are in the
vast majority, so we should make things easy for them.

But it's still great to also have a "gold pack" with everything you
need to get started doing more complicated things.  I think that could
either be a separate installer package, or (if the person working on
the installer wants to do it), it would be cool to have one installer
that has an options screen that lets you check more things to
download.  Even that should be simple in the sense that there should be
an easy way to say "give me a deluxe install" and get more or less
everything.  (I say "more or less" because maybe the installer might
eventually know about a large number of engines, and hardly anyone
would want to download them all at once.)

Just some thoughts.

        --Tim

On Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:07:52 -0700, Arun Persaud <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi
> 
> > [windows installer]
> 
> how would the installer work, would you select some options and then the
> installer would download those files online and install them or would we
> provide separate installers for each option? In any case, how do we need
> to supply those files, can we have them on a ftp-server or would a
> web-server work too?
> 
> Also how much work will it be to create and maintain those installers.
> 
> Guess these are more technical issues, but some of them might influence
> how much fine-tuning we want to allow. As far as providing small files
> or larger ones: is that still an issue nowadays with hard drives being
> quite big... I'm not sure if we need to worry about the size of files
> too much.
> 
> ARUN
> 
> 


-- 
Tim Mann  address@hidden  http://tim-mann.org/