[Lazarus-other] Install and upgrade situation

[Michalis Kamburelis]

Doug Chamberlin wrote:
> On 1/13/12 12:20 PM, Michalis Kamburelis wrote:
>> Honestly: you exaggerate the problem, IMHO.
> I don't think its an exaggerating to observe the regular reports of
> install and upgrade problems. Just look at any 1 month period over the
> past year or so.

Every piece of software has bugreports about install/upgrade problems. 
No matter how easy the procedure is. Partially, that's because the 
environment constantly changes --- new versions of operating systems, 
new versions of libraries, etc. This is a compiler and an IDE, tied to a 
lot of different libraries and dependencies, on a lot of different 
systems. And people are using it in a myriad of different ways.

My main point was: drawing from this a conclusion that there's some 
general problem, needing some single grand solution, is an exaggeration. 
There are just many small problems, that are being eliminated, one by 
one, by developers. And in the meantime, new OSes and libraries appear, 
sometimes introducing new problems...

>
>> For every single panicked bugreport, there are 100 people...
> There are no doubt more successes than problems. But I don't see the
> problem rate going down in any significant way. Nor do I see a reduction
> in problems when people do unusual, but reasonable, things. In short, I
> think the system is more brittle than it should be. But that's just my
> impression.
>
> So I think you are guessing here. Do you have any real numbers?

I don't have any real numbers. My "100" was of course just a guess. 
Although you can look at the number of downloads e.g. on SourceForge. 
This week, https://sourceforge.net/projects/freepascal/ says 12 
thousands downloads. https://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus/ shows 10 
thousands of downloads. That's quite a lot, and it's understandable that 
some percent of these people stumble on some problems.

The only real data that I have is about myself. I've been installing FPC 
since around version 1.0.2, on Linux, Windows, and later Mac OS X. And I 
don't remember having to struggle with something terrible. I'm 
installing Lazarus usually by compiling it with whatever FPC version 
happens to be currently stable --- and it also pretty much just works.

Hence, my simple advice --- first try to install FPC/Lazarus yourself, 
and see if there's really a problem. You may as well find that it's as 
easy as running an installer and clicking "Forward" until the 
installation finishes :)

Michalis