On 11/18/07, Vyatcheslav Yatskovsky wrote:

Hello Mojca,

Thank you for svn account. Where do you think I should place my installer?

I'll drop you a note on a privite mail.

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A wishlist for Vyatcheslav (although I cannot test): - it would be nice if the installer would first ask the user for the location of minimals

It's easy, I'll start with it.

Thanks.

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- then, you need to download (or include in the zip) the rsync binaries and put them into PATH, that path might be a separate one (distinct from ConTeXt bin in any case)

Now rsync is bundled with installer. (I think it changes rarely, so if it will, I'll better update the installer.) if user selects default folder (c:\contextminimal), he gets the following structure:

Directory of C:\contextminimal

11.11.2007 04:36 <DIR> mswin 31.01.2007 11:33 1 873 811 cygwin1.dll 07.11.2006 09:26 283 136 rsync.exe 30.05.2006 16:18 118 784 SetEnv.exe 18.11.2007 01:12 691 481 unins000.exe 18.11.2007 01:12 6 452 unins000.dat

So, installer-related binaries are located in root installations folder, while Contexts sits in mswin subfolder.

OK, rsync should come with it, and true: it doesn't change so often.

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- can you please take a look into http://minimals.contextgarden.net/setup/mswin/ and try to reproduce the behaviour of first-setup.bat. You might need some binaries already present, but it would be nice to get rid of the need for http://minimals.contextgarden.net/minimals/ (even though I will probably keep providing them) - so, it would be nice if you could call mtx-update instead of syncing the whole folder - if you use mtx-update.lua, you can ask the user to select the desired engines,, the desired modules (probably not implemented yet), and the user is also able to choose ConTeXt distribution (to roll back if the latest one causes problems), and choose wheather to clean old files or not; the functionality provided in mtx-update might improve and/or change, but it might be a good idea to keep you informed, it's only that the minimals are still in development phase, so they're not quite stable yet and paths might still change

Hmm.. I never used mtx-update, and, moreover, my experiments with mixing installer scripts with lua scripts failed so far (I cound't make format files from it).

Can you try it once more? http://minimals.contextgarden.net/setup/mswin/ is really minimalistic,so you can probably figure out what's going on (or ask in case you have problems) and try to reproduce it (you can first call rsync to fetch the needed binaries and scripts, and then call mtx-update properly). mtx-update should now be able to create formats when called with "--make" (depending on the engins you select to download).

If mtx-update is so powerful, let it be the base of your installer, but I'd rather keep my simple and "pop", satisfying needs of non-advanced users (like me).

It might not be *so powerful* yet, but it would then be equivalent with the "plain way" of setting things up, and it would be easier for you later to add a checkbox into your installer if some functionality in mtx-update is extended.

BTW, InnoSetup allows to write very flexible scripts using build-in Pascal, so I can always duplicate most needed functionality on it, and I will be 100% confident that it will work on 100% of machines. :)

I believe that. But mtx-update should work on all machines as well (if it doesn't, it should better be fixed). But it would really make sense not to depend on precompiled "full minimals" since you loose most control of what should be included and what not. If you

Rsyncing the whole folder will not be necessary when I implement selection of "components". Then the user can select what to download and what to not (fonts, etc.) I'd be very thankful if you point me out some obvious components that user might exclude from set up.

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- it would be nice to have "enable minimals/disable minimals" switch, so that one can theoretically run MikTeX in parallel (when the distribution is enabled, it shadows MikTeX, when it's disabled, MikTeX will run normally)

Yeah, but know very well that making Contest work in global way requires not only enabling its settings, but disabling MikTeX settings...

OK, I didn't know that. What exactly do you need to do (which MikTeX components/settings do you need to disable) if you want to enable "minimal ConTeXt"?

So it would be troublesome, and I believe that person having both packages should better use conventional installer, like yours.

But in that case any "comfortable windows user" would still be greatuf for an "installer", even if its sole reason is to ask the user for the destination of the distribution, and to download the necessary files. So, everything can remain the same, but you don't need to set eny environmental variables, you only create a batch file called "enablecontext.bat" or similar somewhere in PATH (or in some place that you place into PATH), with the contens: C:\Programs\context\setuptex.bat C:\Programs\context depending on where the user decided to install ConTeXt. So, when someone is in console and types in enablecontext, the environment will be set up properly. That was the approach I've been using when working on windows. (When I think about it, setuptex could (or should?) be adapted in such a way that one wouldn't need to provide any arguments to it, but that's a completely unrelated subject.) Some *really low priority* tasks for the future of the installer might also be: - check if ruby is installed and ask the user to install it if needed (well, Hans is planning to rewrite most of his ruby scripts to lua, so that miht not even be necessary :) - check if perl is installed and ask the user to install it if needed - [for me] once the rest is done, I would like to reproduce "mswincontext.zip" (add the missing bits and pieces to the repository), but that's also lower priority than the rest

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- you might need to provide alternative servers in the future/ask the user which server to choose for downloading (in case of too much traffic, another server could possibly mirror the contents from the garden)

Sure. Just point me them.

Well ... only as a remainder for the future :) According to Patrick we didn't reach the bandwidth limit yet :)

P.S. If you cannot run the installer, you may found useful see my screenshots attached.

Great! Thanks a lot for it. It really looks proffessional. There's only a slightly misleading information (you need at least 2.9 MB space :) :) :) :) (Miktex -> MikTeX, Context -> ConTeXt) Thanks a lot for the great job :) Such an installed has been waited for for wuite some time :) Mojca