bzr-windows team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

2009/8/8 Sidnei da Silva <sidnei.da.silva@xxxxxxxxx>:
> On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 2:24 AM, Ian
> Clatworthy<ian.clatworthy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Hi and welcome to the Bazaar Windows mailing list!
>>
>> To get the ball rolling, I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on how
>> Bazaar ought to be packaged on Windows. I think we should start by
>> thinking about an ideal outcome. We can worry about reality - installer
>> size, toolset + compilers, time remaining until 2.0 ships - after we
>> have some agreement about what we're aiming for.
>>
>> Here are some "degrees of freedom" to consider:
>>
>> * OS version: XP vs Vista vs 7 vs 2003, etc.
>> * 32 vs 64 bit
>
> I assume this is about which versions to support installation on. If
> that's the case, here's my opinion:
>
> - We should support installation in all releases from XP to 7, but not
> on anything older than that, like 2000 or 95.
> - We should probably start making NTFS a requirement, since there are
> filesystem operations that only work on NTFS and not on FAT32 and
> older which we could benefit from. In a couple years we could drop
> support for XP and 2003 and start benefiting from the transactional
> filesystem support that exists in Vista and newer to make certain
> operations cheaper (this is already exposed in pywin32, AFAICT).

I'd really rather just have us use those if they're available.
Supporting old machines and flash sticks and so on is quite useful -
also people may use Samba or embedded Samba servers or other CIFS
filesystems that don't correctly/fully support these features.

>> * admin rights: some users will have them and others may not
>
> This is a biggie. Installing inside the Users folder instead of
> system-wide should work just fine for pretty much everything except
> TortoiseBZR. If we make TortoiseBZR a separate or optional install,
> then a non-admin install will certainly be possible.
>
> I particularly like the way installing Chrome on Windows works, it
> feels like a really nice experience. The only complaint I have there
> is that it doesn't even ask you whether you want to install
> system-wide, so there's a surprise when you switch accounts and you
> have to install Chrome again.

I think it should ask; some other installers do that.

>
>> * bundled python vs not
>
> +1 for bundled.

This is not something where we necessarily get to chose: some people
have Python installed and need Bazaar to work with that.  However, I
_think_ we can get by with Python bundled in our installer, and then
having a bdist built that works with easy_install into any other
Python they have.

> There needs to be a balance of which things get included, but it also
> should be trivial to get add-ons. I generally prefer the 'net
> installer' approach, like Cygwin and MikTEX, which give you an a
> chance to pick other options that are not bundled and then perform the
> download for you.
>
> Most applications seem to be moving to this approach. Most notably,
> all recent Microsoft software gives you the option of downloading a
>>1Mb bootstrap installer that lets you pick some options then fetches
> and installs only the software you choose. They also give you an
> option to download a full, 'offline installer' which is generally way
> bigger and includes everything and the kitchen sink.

That seems good, but maybe it will require building some
infrastructure to do it, therefore it could be deferred until after
we've fixed some of the other items?

Presumably the 'what do you want' feature would be handled in qbzr and
I think that already makes the package fairly big?

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>