Geoffrey Hutchison wrote:
Avogadro is a great program I often use. I therefore contributed a
Windows installer that you
successfully used for Avogadro 0.8.1 and 0.9.0.
Obviously, we greatly appreciated the enhancements you made in the
installer.
I’m not sure I can say that it was used successfully in version 0.9.0.
We had many bug reports of “configuration incorrect, please
reinstall”. Basically, if you didn’t have VS Express installed, the
installer would fail. (I can count 3 bug reports on the tracker, and a
few more which were sent via e-mail to the list or to some of us
personally.)
This is one of the big reasons I wanted to ensure we got a new release
out for people to test in a timely manner. The 0.9.0 installer simply
did not work on many systems. I am not a Windows developer and so do not
claim to know all the ins and outs of Windows developments. I did
however spend significant time tracking down Windows issues and trying
to improve the situation.
e.g., mailing list message from Noel O’Boyle:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=a882e48b0902100220r446f1ffeq788824d5f2fd3915%40mail.gmail.com&forum_name=avogadro-devel
That’s partly due to the installer, partly due to pain with Windows
manifests. I’d personally be happy if we could get your NSIS installer
working without the manifest issues.
As would I. I see CPack as a very interesting part of CMake. It allows
for much more automation than seemed possible with NSIS on its own, but
I have had some issues and limited time to deal with them. I second
Geoff and say if you can come contribute a better Windows installer I
would happily use it.
That said I think that once all the niggles with CPack are corrected it
offers a very good solution to producing regular binary releases for
Windows and Mac. It is able to fully integrate with CMake and produce
installers with multiple configurations. I however spend very little
time developing on Windows, and so would welcome advice from people
who know more than me about Windows.
I’m really disappointed about your developing philosophy. I’m an
open source developer for years and
in other projects such changes are discussed before releases.
Well, I do recall a lot of discussion about the installer:
http://blog.cryos.net/archives/209-Manifest-Hell...The-New-DLL-Hell.html
Thread: [Avogadro-devel] Avogadro 0.9.1 Windows binary - still no Python | Avogadro
Thread: [Avogadro-devel] Avogadro 0.9.1 this weekend - 24 hours for fixes | Avogadro
Thread: [Avogadro-devel] CPack based Windows installer | Avogadro
Now, I’m sorry if we didn’t send messages to you personally. But we
try to discuss all major changes thoroughly on the mailing list, and
we take regressions extremely seriously.
I communicated with you on the bug tracker, made best efforts to
reproduce the error you reported but was unable to. On the other hand we
had many Windows users who could not use Avogadro 0.9.0 due to the
manifest issue. I posted several items to the mailing list, my blog and
kept an eye on the bug tracker.
Here’s a list what the installer of version 0.8.1 can do and the new
regression with the installer
of version 0.9.1:
Well, these are clearly bugs and should be fixed – either by a
working NSIS installer, or an improved CPack one. Since neither Tim,
Marcus, or myself are Windows experts, it’s very hard for us to fix
such issues. This is one reason that we had such problems dealing with
the “configuration incorrect” manifest issue.
If you can help generate a 0.9.1 installer with working manifests,
we’d certainly use it – particularly if we can automatically generate
it easily on a VMware image.
I agree with this sentiment and was just writing a response to you when
I saw this email come in. I will likely continue looking into CPack as
an automated build solution on Mac and Windows, but would go with
whatever worked best. The installer still involved a lot of manual work
for Tim and made releases quite time intensive to produce.
I don’t think any of the regressions listed is as serious as Avogadro
not running, which is the regression we had with the 0.9.0 installer on
a large portion of systems.
I don’t know now if it is worth to spent any more time to Avogadro
or not.
Well, I’m sorry if you don’t feel the group is being run to your
satisfaction. Perhaps you could outline some suggestions for the
developer community as a whole? We try to be pretty open about
critiques, criticism, and mistakes. We’re all human.
Avogadro is first and foremost a cross-platform application. In my
opinion anything that can be done to reduce duplication and ease
maintenance burden is a good thing. That is why I worked on a CPack
based NSIS installer - Windows releases have always been one of the most
time consuming to produce. I would like to fix any regressions whether
that means in CPack and/or using the NSIS installer scripts you contributed.
I think we are an open community, but welcome feedback from others. I
apologize for any offense caused. I am doing what I can with the time I
have available to improve Avogadro. Many of us spend a significant
amount of our spare time working on this project, and welcome help from
others.
I certainly welcome help and feedback, especially in areas where my
knowledge is not as current - such as with Windows packaging.
Thanks,
Marcus
