Hi

I took the liberty to add a task for proper Lazarus installers into the new http://wiki.freepascal.org/Lazarus_Season_of_Code page.

Installation is now much too difficult. This is a typical situation in an open source project. There are few core developers who already know how to install.
The ones that suffer from the problem don't know how to fix it.

There are many examples of programs that are easy to install. One of them is http://www.teamviewer.com (which I just learned to know). There is a big Start/Download button which can't be missed. It recognizes your OS and offers the right package, RPM or DEB for Linux, DMG for Mac, EXE for Windows (could be also MSI), app store link for iPhone.

A Linux distro that has FPC and Lazarus available in its package server is now the best OS for installing Lazarus bacause the package manager takes care of FPC dependency for Lazarus.
Click and OK, just like it should be.

Other platforms have problems. For example Windows: I installed Lazarus for Windows for the first time. Then I had already installed SVN versions of both FPC and Lazarus on Linux, configured git-svn link to use the subversion server directly with git, and committed lots of code for the converter in Lazarus. So I was not a complete newbie any more. Still I had to ask instructions on chat for how to install on Windows, and without asking it would have gone wrong. Namely I would have chosen "fpc-2.4.0.source.zip" instead of "fpcbuild-2.4.0.zip" when I wanted FPC sources.

The goal should be a one-click installer for anyone who wants to try Lazarus.

Juha
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Juha Manninen wrote

Still I had to ask instructions on chat for how to install on Windows, and without asking it would have gone wrong. Namely I would have chosen "fpc-2.4.0.source.zip" instead of "fpcbuild-2.4.0.zip" when I wanted FPC sources.

Lazarus comes with FPC sources?

The goal should be a one-click installer for anyone who wants to try Lazarus.

Just get
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus/files/Lazarus%20Windows%2032%20bits/Lazarus%200.9.28.2/lazarus-0.9.28.2-fpc-2.2.4-win32.exe/download ?

Of course, if you want bleeding edge code, this is more difficult, but this is always the case.

2010/7/28 Juha Manninen :

I took the liberty to add a task for proper Lazarus installers into the new http://wiki.freepascal.org/Lazarus_Season_of_Code page.

Just to clarify one point: The list is just a list of ideas, I will decide which ones make it to the project or not.

For other things, please lets keep this discussion in only one place, so please reply only to:

http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,10021.msg49474.html#new

True, I needed a more recent compiler and didn't use the installer. Sorry about the wrong claims about Windows installation.

Juha
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Juha Manninen wrote

True, I needed a more recent compiler and didn't use the installer.

Recently I noticed that the snapshots page at
http://www.hu.freepascal.org/lazarus/ does not list the windows installers with fpc 2.5.1 while when looking directly at the ftp server ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/lazarus/snapshots/ there are windows installers with 2.5.1 and I have used a few of them already and they seem to work.

Maybe the website should be updated to include these downloads.

Bernd Kreuss wrote

Maybe the website should be updated to include these downloads.

And maybe some automatically updated symlinks or redirects with always the same names like

* lazarus-latest-fpc-2.4.3-win32.exe
* lazarus-latest-fpc-latest-win32.exe
etc.

that could then be easily linked to from the wiki or any other website or mentioned in a forum post or in an email message to someone and always work would also be a nice idea.

Such a direct link would be easier than having to write something like: "go to the ftp server and find the file that has lazarus and fpc-2.5.1 and win32 and .exe in its name, it should be somewhere near the top of the list".