[GRASS-dev] Re: WinGRASS-6.3.0RC5 Self Installer

[Moritz Lennert]

On 15/03/08 11:48, Marco Pasetti wrote:
> Glynn,
> 
>> In fact, I'm quite worried that the main consequence of an easy-to-use
> installer could be a large number of useless bug reports which don't provide
> any useful information and just end up distracting (and possibly
> de-motivating) the developers who are working on the Windows version.
> 
>> Anyone who wants a robust version of GRASS for Windows should be using the
> Cygwin version.
> 
> Thanks a lot for de-motivating ME on working this way!
> Actually, I really could have spent all those hours and energies to do
> something else, ...my thesis, for example.
> If you think that my work is not only useless for WinGRASS, but even
> counterproductive for it, I can stop it right now. It really would be a
> great saving of wasted time!

I don't think that Glynn meant that your work is useless and wasted time 
! On the contrary, I think your installer will allow many more people to 
test winGRASS, as it takes away the hurdle of having to install manually.

I think what Glynn means is that we have to be very honest about what we 
are selling here. winGRASS works well in many aspects, but there are 
still quite a lot of problems. You might not see them the first time 
around, but when you actually start using it for production work, you 
will sooner or later stumble upon them. So, if we now go out and say: 
"Here's winGRASS, it's perfect unless you install it in a path with 
spaces", then we risk creating more dissatisfied "I told you so" users, 
because that's not true.

You say:
>> I decided to force a "working installation" for the following
>> reason: the aim of all this work is, obviously, to spread GRASS as 
>> most as possible, because there are a lot of Windows users out 
>> there... so, to convince them to use GRASS, we need to be sure that it 
>> will definetely work on their machines, because Windows users are not 
>> used to *test* software and report bugs... 

At this stage, winGRASS cannot "definitely work on their machines", as 
there are still many winGRASS specific bugs which go far beyond the 
spaces in paths problem (BTW we need to clean up the wiki wingrass 
status page). We should probably clearly state (and if possible at the 
beginning of the installation procedure) that this is alpha-stage 
software (I don't know what the threshold is for calling it beta ?) and 
that they are quite probably going to encounter problems sooner or 
later, but that we would be very grateful if they would still try and 
tell us about their experience.

AFAIK, many MS Windows software providers release at least beta-versions 
for testing, and people do test. This is what we have been doing, and 
your installer greately facilitates this process.

Let's just be frank about the state of affairs.

Moritz