Re: [XBoard-devel] Windows Installer

[Tim Mann]

On Tue, 24 Feb 2004 16:21:32 -0800, Mark Ioli <address@hidden> wrote:
> Have some thoughts/ideas I wanted to run by you guys:
> 
> So far I have a "core" installer that does just the base winboard 
> components, no chess engines. Size with best compression: 1.2MB
> 
> There is also a "full" install that has everything including a Crafty 
> engine (19.3) with docs, opening book (downloaded from Bob Hyatt's 
> site), and shortcuts similar to the GNUChess ones. Size with best 
> compression: 6.2MB 

Hmm, that's not too bad.  4.2.7 with GNU Chess 4 and 5, InstallShield
installer, and zip compression is about 5.6 MB. 

> Do you think adding the souce code for each component 
> would be too much or even desireable?

IMO, I don't think it would be desirable to have the installer install
the source code.  It should just tell people where to get it if they
want it.  Most people don't need it, so it would just make the download
bigger for no benefit to them.

> Another thought I had was coming up with a network installer, which 
> would be very small and present the user with the choice of exactly what 
> they want to install, from core components to engines to source code, or 
> anything else we provide. These would be kept on the web/ftp site and 
> downloaded according to what they chose. It could be made generic enough 
> so that it would look for a certain file to know what the latest version 
> is and which packages are available to download, so the installer 
> wouldn't have to be updated with each release. Could maybe even include 
> betas or RCs of upcoming versions if we wanted, again, people could just 
> run the same installer they already have. The good side is that people 
> are downloading only what they want, so potentially saves some bandwidth 
> on the server.

That sounds cool.  It would be great if engine authors could easily plug
their engines into this system, so that their engines would install
without the user needing to dink around editing winboard.ini, etc.

> Thoughts/suggestions etc?
> 
> Also, how should I make these test installers available to you to try 
> out, without releasing to everyone. Is there a space I can upload to 
> that only we can access for now?

We should be able to get some space on ftp://alpha.gnu.org/.  In fact,
Daniel already asked for this and cc'ed me on the message.  (I didn't
notice at the time that he didn't cc the list, sorry.)  I'm not sure
what happened on that.

It would also be possible for me to give you some upload space on my web
site tim-mann.org (or possibly even on my home machine mumblefrotz.org
if it's just for the small circle of active developers) if there is any
holdup getting access to alpha.gnu.org.

-- 
Tim Mann  address@hidden  http://tim-mann.org/