Just a couple of notes. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time as of late testing the current MONO builds against the current MarcEdit codebase. It looks like the latest stable version works just fine with the program, while the 3.0.x branch has a few rendering issues (not sure if they are mine or not — I’m looking into it). Anyway, what this means is that I’m looking at working on trying to simplify the installation process for folks using the software on Linux/Mac systems. I’m starting with Linux (since I run Linux). Right now, I’m working on using a tool called: makeself (http://megastep.org/makeself/) which will create a self extracting archive and then allow me to execute a cleanup script to take away a number of the necessary steps during the install process. Ideally, the steps would be:
- Run the install script
- Run MarcEdit
OR - Get a report of missing dependencies
This would remove the need to remember to run the bootloader to clean up and set install paths, as well as get the configuration right for Z39.50 use if it yaz is installed on the system. It should also give me a method to check dependencies and provide a list of packages needing to be installed to make installation as simple as possible (though at this point, the only dependencies are the mono-core and the System.Windows.Forms libraries — which sometimes is and sometimes isn’t included in specific distributions definition of “core” files).
Once I have this build process defined, I’ll find myself a mac and give MONO’s MacPackager a whirl. It seems like that might be a simple solution to packaging the program, and at this point, all the Z39.50 components can be disabled to greatly simplify the process.
Ideally, once I have an installer in place, I should be able to tweak MarcEdit’s automated updater so that Mac/Linux users receive notifications and downloads of the current installers. From there, they would just need to spawn them within their own specific environments. Easier — I hope so. And as always, I’ll continue to provide a plan zip file for download, for those folks in environments that don’t allow the installation of software.
Questions, comments — let me know.
–tr