Re: [Gnumed-devel] Re: previous postings to do with installers

[Sebastian Hilbert]

On Saturday 19 June 2004 05:57, Ian Haywood wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Jun 2004 13:43:03 +0200
>
> Sebastian Hilbert <address@hidden> wrote:
> > I guess what I am saying comes down to this.
> > ( wget http://www.gnumed.org/installer.sh |sh installer.sh (or something
> > like this. )
> >
> > 1) an installer of Python for each target OS/distro, configured to know
> >  GnuMed's "Python" needs
>
> WARNING: rant coming up:
>
> Ultimately it is not our job to write an automatic dependency-resolver for
> various proprietary operating systems that do not have one. Presumably
> those users accepted that deficiency when making their selection ;-)
Got your point. It's not our job but sometimes it's not about who did what but 
what can be done about it.
>
> The manual already has "click on this link and run it, then click on this
> one" section for Windows to install what's required. IMHO that's as easy as
> it's going to get. What we need is the final step, a link to a Python
> script which installs gnumed itself. This could be as simple as
>
> os.mkdir ("C:\Program Files\GNUMed")
> os.chdir ("C:\Program Files\GNUMed")
> for f in urllib.urlopen ("http://gnumed.net/windows/MANIFEST";).readlines
> (): os.makedirs (os.path.dirname (f))
>       out = file (f)
>       out.write (urllib.urlopen ("http://gnumed.net/windows/"; + f).read ())
>       out.close ()
It could but Gnumed is not about how easy it could be but what works best. At 
least I got this impression :-). So I personally will work on what I proposed 
unless someone detects the flaw in my concept. Since I am into studying right 
now that won't happen until September.

I don't favour an python installation script. This is because much effort has 
gone into NSIS. It has some nice features, lacks some but I won't try to 
write YASI (yet another simple installer) in python at least on Windows.

I will however use python to enhance the installer whenever things need to be 
detected.

On Linux I would like to make use of distro native package manager. This 
involves quite some effort to maintain all packages. Please take a look at 
autopackage. I don't know how it performs but at least it will let us deploy 
one package format for all(?) Linux distros without losing too muach 
features. BTW v.1.0 (not there yet) will supposedly integrate with the 
package managers. 
>
> What the Mac guys really want of course is a single 20 meg zip that
> contains gnumed plus binaries of python, wxpython and postgres: one icon to
> start the server process (with the database already installed), one for the
> client. Insane as it may be from a unix perspective [or maybe not, see:
> zero-install.sourceforge.net], if that's what's best for their platform
> then we should go with it.
>
> > As for the server side. I don't favor GUI installation here. IMHO it's
> > better to provide a very good (yet to be written) installation tutorial.
> > At least for postgres.
>
> IMHO a gnumed database installation/upgrade wizard is inevitable, but
> currently rather pointless as there is no way yet to install postgres on
> Windows without using Cygwin and its shell.
>
Time will tell. I will try to implement the installer as modular was possible.
If everything works I hope it will one could run the installer to complete 
various tasks but could just as well call each step individually. 

We will see. Sometimes it's all about visions. 

-- 
Sebastian Hilbert 
Leipzig / Germany
[www.openmed.org] -> PGP welcome, HTML ->/dev/null
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My OS: Suse Linux. Geek by Nature, Linux by Choice