<snip>
>
>Also, the folks who say "use emerge foo.bar" or "apt-get baz.woof" to
>install don't understand that the real problem is the complexity and
>lack of coherence of the components in gEDA. Yes, you can do "emerge
>geda", but what about PCB? How is the totally ignorant user to know
>that he also needs PCB? And ngspice? and gerbv? This is our problem
>to fix.
In Gentoo, there is a package called geda-suite which installs:
geda-20050820
gerbv-1.0.1
gnucap-20050808
gwave-20031224
pcb-20050609
iverilog-0.8
ng-spice-rework-15
gnetman-0.0.1_pre20041222
gtkwave"
but I agree it would be nice if there were a more cohesive feel between all these programs.
For the majority, it's a good idea to have an install. I agree that it
would be hard to write one that works for all distros and is up to date
while distros are changing. Exactly this why i suggest to split users and
write the install program for only those who use a system that lacks a
package system that can handle the situation. This would limit the number
of distros a bit, like you could say "this install cd supports readhat,
suse and windows" (picked a few systems randomly). I also think that for
these kind of users binaries are very important so such a cd should
contain binaries for some common platforms, like 64bit x86.
I like this idea. There is no point in writing an installer that works on a distro with a package management system when the user would have rather opened up Synaptic and searched for geda and clicked install like they do with all other pieces of software they install.
Another interesting approach would be to provide a live cd. There are many
live linux distros out there, so it would be possible to add gEDA to one
of them. This way the 'lazy' user could try out the system without needing
to understand parts of it, reading manuals, installing or anything like
that. If he likes it, probably he will invest some more time in the
installation process. It would be like a trial period so the user could
decide to invest time or not after experiencing a working version.
I like this idea too, as long as it's not too much work to implement.
Cheers,
Taylor