Making it easier for inexperienced installers
As a result of helping an inexperienced person (who is computer literate but not a techo) with an install on Windows 10 yesterday, I propose that for the current release, we provide a set of files (ie MySql, Java, Tomcat, etc) to download. These will be targeted at Windows users (on the assumption that anyone doing a unix install is competent enough to not need hand-holding).
[To illustrate the problem the link we provide for Java leads to the following:
The link we need is not the top one (which is the JDK) but rather the JRE - but on clicking this, there is a further bewildering array of choices.
Whilst this approach is not going to get the latest sub-release, it will overcome the problem of "which of all these possible downloads do I need".
I also need to tweak some of the language in the install instructions - eg "run the following in a shell prompt" resulted in the user asking what a 'shell prompt' was.
I also should provide a Win 10 install guide (equivalent to the one Yuri did for Win 7) - but that is a good day's work.
Comments please.
Regards, Tim G
Re: Making it easier for inexperienced installers
To be honest you can massage those instruction and provide download links as much as you want ...In the end the inexperienced installers will still require help and quite frankly how many of the self installed installations do you run across now that "just arent quite working as expected" The reality is that because of they way Open is sold the downside is it is not always installed to SPEC and thus ends up compromised.
The reason I think that some installers have left our market is because of the implication that Open Source means free and that the user doesnt have any major expense getting the software up and running. Which is ONLY true if the person installing is IT savvy especially with linux.
Re: Making it easier for inexperienced installers
I don't really want to be hosting 3rd party binaries in OpenVPMS.
We'd have to keep them up to date with the latest releases, and host multiple versions for x86 and x64. If you are going to include Windows binaries, there would also be a case for including binaries for OS X.
I'm not even sure if the Oracle licensing permits hosting of MySQL. The mysql connector has/had licensing where this wasn't permitted.
Re: Making it easier for inexperienced installers
Tim - reluctantly after some googling, I agree with you - hosting 3rd party binaries is a very grey area.
However, I think that we can make things a little easier by providing more direct links to the required items. That is, we leave the current links as is, but provide (down the bottom of the requirements page) a set of direct links where these are available. Yes, these will point at specific versions - eg http://downloads.mysql.com/archives/get/file/mysql-5.1.72-win32.msi - but they will provide something that can be immediately downloaded without navigating from the more generic link. And yes - these may become broken if the vendor changes things.
However, we can include a warning that these specific links may go out of date, and may load older versions. For MySQL were are OK because we are already behind and we know that the latest 5.1 (or 5.5) version will not change. However with Java where updates to 1.8 are still being generated, we will link to what will become an older version - however in this case the Java update mechanism will take care of things.
I will have a play with the 1.9 CSH and we can see how it turns out. If useful, then we can back port to the 1.8 CSH.
Regards, Tim G