[Pythonmac-SIG] installer bugs

[Jack Jansen]

On donderdag, jul 3, 2003, at 01:11 Europe/Amsterdam, Russell E Owen 
wrote:
> I then ran the installer.
> - **** Minor Bug? *****  "Select a Destination" page of the installer 
> says "Installing this software requires 0 bytes of disk space". This 
> is after selecting a suitable disk (I only have one).

Known bug, but I've filed 765608 anyway. At the very least the readme 
should explain this.

> - The next page claims it'll be doing an upgrade. Interesting. I 
> wonder how it knew. As a long shot, I wonder if this is related to the 
> claim of 0 bytes (if it thought it was going to overwrite an existing 
> installation...).

This is because there's still a receipt from a previous installation 
hiding somewhere. Don't worry about it.

> I then ran the IDE. It seems to work, but it's not seeing PYTHONPATH 
> (which is defined in ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist so aqua applications 
> do normally see it). Strange, but perhaps this was true for 2.3b1 as 
> well...I'm not sure I ever tried.

Good catch! There's a bug for this: 765615.

> **** Bug ***** I then ran the package manager, to try to install 
> Tkinter. The IDE launched, but then I got an error message:
>
> Cannot open http://www.python.org/packman/
> version-0.3/darwin-6.3-Power_Macintosh.plist: HTTP
> Error 404: Not Found

This happened because you're running 10.2.3 or so, but you probably 
guessed as much already. But there's real bugs here too:

> See MacPython Package Manager help page.
>
> The install manager then was visible, but with no entries. So I looked 
> at the help (the entry is actually called "Installing additional 
> Python packages with the Package Manager", so I confess it took me a 
> bit to find it).
>
> Anyway, it suggested I might find an alternative package manager at 
> "http://www.python.org/packman" so I naively tried entering exactly 
> that into the Open URL... dialog box and got a traceback:

That's a bug. I've submitted 765621 for it.
> ***** Comment ***** It'd be nice if the manual install message had a 
> button to go to the home page or at least explicitly suggested doing 
> that. As it stands, the message is so cryptic that I doubt most naive 
> users would have any idea what to do.

There is a button:-) The text now refers to it.

> Other package manager comments:
> - Much of the descriptive text (third column) is truncated, and making 
> the window wider doesn't help because all three columns grow. 
> Suggested fixes:

This is a problem inherent with the widget I use. I don't think it's 
easy to fix, and as the widget is doomed anyway and I hope to have a 
PyObjC-based Package Manager fairly soon I don't want to put too much 
work in it.

>   - Move it to a separate panel. This allows lots of room for the 
> description, so you could answer some obvious naive questions such as 
> "do I need both source and binary of something, and if not, which 
> should I choose?" and the comment for _tkinter can say that it's all a 
> user needs to use Tkinter.
>    - Fix resizing (a good idea in any case) so the left column never 
> grows. The second column probably doesn't need to either--certainly 
> not much.
> - Consider hiding source distributions by default. Naive users will 
> only need the binary and I think it's confusing to have both visible.

But then they wouldn't know about packages that are only available as 
source... OTOH: the scapegoat should create binary packages anyway of 
everything interesting... What do other people feel about this?

Thanks for the great feedback!
--
- Jack Jansen        <Jack.Jansen at oratrix.com>        
http://www.cwi.nl/~jack -
- If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma 
Goldman -