[Eric] Simplified installation?

[Peter Bradley]

Ysgrifennodd Andreas Pakulat:
> Hmm, Maybe I'm already too used to the quirks of win32, but for me
> installing eric4 worked perfectly fine (without MSYS of course). I
> already had Qt4.3 compiled from sources (actually qt-copy from KDE's
> svn) and Python installed too. So I went ahead and installed the latest
> sip release . No other problems here. Then
> installed QScintilla2, absolutely no problems. After that I installed
> PyQt4, 2 problems, small bug in configure.py here wrt. a missing
> QMAKE_CFLAGS_THREAD variable in mkspecs/default/qmake.conf. The other
> one is that sip generates a wrong Qt path in the Makefile (it uses /
> instead of \). Both really easy to solve - IMHO. Then I built and
> installed the python wrappers for QScintilla and that had the same
> slash-problem for the installation as PyQt itself. 
>
> Last thing is eric4, only problem here was the need to copy
> qscintilla2.dll into Qt's bin directory because the lib dir is not in
> PATH. Thats all, eric4 now runs and shows its configuration dialog.
>
> Yes this is not straight forward (and AFAIK Phil will provide eric4
> packages sooner or later, can't recall if he said with the next release
> or earlier), but the problems are not that big either. Also I reported
> these three to Phil already so I expect them to be fixed soon.
>
> Andreas
>
>   

I'm sure you're right, Andreas; but personally I think the problem is at 
least as much to do with documentation as with the business of having to 
download, compile and install all sorts of dependencies from source.

First you need a compiler, probably, because there's no guarantee there 
will be one installed; especially on Windows.  Then you need all the 
dependent programs and sources.  Unfortunately, the download site 
doesn't list all the dependencies (e.g. SIP is not listed IIRC), nor 
does it list them in the order in which they should be installed.  Then 
you get offered binary installers, which you use only to find that, 
despite what they say about installing all the necessary bits, they 
don't in fact do so.  Then you find that because you followed the 
prerequisites in the order they're listed on the Eric download site that 
you've installed stuff in the wrong order and/or the wrong places and 
that you have to uninstall all sorts of stuff and by this time you can't 
remember exactly what you installed, and how, and when.

Then you decide life's too short and start looking for proprietary IDEs.

If the Eric download site gave a blow-by-blow account of what you have 
to do to install it, I'm sure things would improve immensely.  And by 
"blow-by-blow", I mean a set of instructions that anyone can follow as 
long as they're not totally computer illiterate.  In work, I make our 
technical writers follow their own instructions step-by-step, exactly as 
written before I'll sign off on them.  It's amazing how many times you 
have to say, "Why are you doing that?  It's not in what you've written." 
or "What program's that you're using?  Do you know for sure that all 
your users have it installed?"

Just my 2c (Ceiniogau Cymreig).  YMMV


Peter