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

[Ian Haywood]

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 ;-)

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 ()

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.

Ian

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