Sunday, May 16, 2010

next stop: frozen boostrap, I mean frozen yogurt

Hi all,

Back in the days when GNUmed appeared for Windows. A number of user way smarter then me
managed to break it in unpredictable ways. Installation meant hit or miss. Later frozen binaries
came along. They have been a huge success. I decided that despite my careful cecking of installed
dependencies users would still find ways to break it. So for some time the only thing you can
download for MS Windows is a frozen client.

Gone are the days when someone mailed in that something went wrong during installation
of the dependencies. There simply are none anymore. One file to install. That is it.

Users have been happy so far and I have not heard of any complaints regarding the client
on MS Windows.

But every story has a dark side. Now that we did not have a way to keep users from trying
the client they started looking at local databases. Until now we have been hiding behind a
brick wall of depedencies for the boostraper. Users still managed to install GNUmed server
and bootstrap on Windows. A few releases back we started by catering for the Windows
users by not asking a single question. We would even supply the passwords for Postgresql.

What a horrible thing to do but noone complained. However one or the other smart user
still failed to cross our brick wall of python, mxtools and psycopg2 dependencies.

Those days are now officially over. From version 0.7.4 there is only one single dependency -
PostgreSQL. Thats is all. You want to bootstrap ? Go ahead. No more dependencies. After
installation of GNUmed-server you are ready to boostrap.

This is considered a great day for our users. I am afraid that now that client and server
installation is so dead easy nothing is holding you back from looking at the features of
GNUmed and letting us know what you think.

There are still a few things I would like to see implemented:
- handling of previously installed PostgreSQL during installation
- status icon for PostgreSQL
- a webbased configuration file editor

Take care,
Sebastian

No comments: