Re: Kepler, Xavante and CO

["Andre Carregal" <carregal@...>]

On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 7:29 AM, Eike Decker <eike@cube3d.de> wrote:
> Hi
> I've wasted a lot of time now on trying to get it run and I am close to giving
> up.
>
> I got in contact with Kepler years ago and I was pretty happy back then how easy
> it was to configure and install on windows.
>
> Contrary to everything that is going on today. So let's go back.
> (...)
> However the whole process was a bit disappointing. I remember quite well when I
> installed kepler the first time with it's setup.exe file. It was really easy.
> Point and click and run. Now I am not new to the package system - after all I
> did use some debian systems and am familiar with apt-get and such tools. So the
> idea of having a system that allows me to download packages of all kind is
> appealing. But why do I need to specify the installation directories everytime?
> I am aware that this is no issue if unix is used because the file structure is
> normally quite the same on each system and harddrive limitations are less a
> problem because filesystems can be mounted in directories etc. etc.
> But on windows, I would expect things to work a bit different.

While I fully understand your frustation, let me try to explain what
happened since you first met Kepler.

Kepler 1.0 was easy to install on Windows, but it's installer was
really hard to maintain and the modules had to be compiled by hand for
every release (a problem you should have a strong opinion about by
now). Around 2006 we came with the idea of LuaRocks, a package system
that could help a lot on such scenarios.

With LuaRocks in place, Kepler moved from a monolithic installer to a
more customizable one. The problem is that this customization is still
too error prone for new users. We are trying to find a way to better
integrate Kepler and LuaRocks, but we are still not there.

Note that we now also have LfW (Lua For Windows) as a very nice option
for installing Lua and module on Windows, so it may be possible (in
the near future) to join LfW+LR+Kepler in an integrated solution that
would be easier for Windows users while keeping another one still
flexible enough for Unix users.

We are not there yet, but there are solutions on the horizon, both for
a Windows simpler installer and a Unix self contained package. Please
bear with us... :o)

André