Improving the distro packaging and installation experience

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

jblack at merconline.com (James Blackwell) writes:

> I'd also add cygwin, freebsd and target Fedora rather than Redhat.

What about MacOS X?

>  1) Installation instructions should be provided for each distribution for
>  both manual package installation and for repository style installation
>  when possible. A staggering number of users are not aware of how to
>  manage dependancies manually with dpkg or how to hack their sources.list.
>  Seriously.

For LilyPond, we used to have installation instructions, and packages
for latest Red Hat (later Fedora) and Cygwin (Debian unstable having
good up to date support).

I dare not say if the LilyPond user base would be comparable to Bzr's,
but we found that users do not like to read installation instructions.
Installation should Just Work (TM).

> The easiest thing would be to provide repositories for all verisons of all
> distros that want to be supported. Included should be bzr itself,
> python-central, python-celementtree and python-paramiko.

Because LilyPond has about 15 dependencies (including bleeding-edge
version of ghostscript), we now ship simple binary installers for any
Linux x86, MacOS X (intel, ppc), Windows, freebsd, that just include
everything you need, installed in a separate prefix, see

    http://lilypond.org/web/install

This has turned out to work very well.

Greetings,
Jan.

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke at gnu.org> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien       | http://www.lilypond.org