Hello
Thank you for engaging me on this issue. While I am a deep believer in freedom as you mention it I also need to be able to have people (who understand none of the technospeak and specialized words), able to get to an installed usable version. Even your answer leaves my head swimming.
In going to the web page "Getting Gnumeric" the new, excited, but unknowledgeable potential user is confronted with an immediate technospeak problem. Pushing the "Get Gnumeric Now" produces nothing now. It produces a confusing explanation of possible sources, but nowhere to just Get Gnumeric.
The difficulty
appears to arise when we consider *what* a user should
obtain after clicking
the button.
I agree with this.
Clearly
this would need to be specific to the desktop of each user doing
the
clicking. Ideally, for the two dominant closed desktop environments,
we
would have installable artifacts since those users have been trained
to look
for such bundles.
Perhaps we could do something
for the most common of the desktops.
E.g., Microsoft Windows.
I do not know what a closed desktop environment is, nor an installable artifact. In particular, my students are simply desktop and laptop users, who have not had any training to look for such bundles. I do not know what a bundle is nor what it may refer to.
For the open desktop
systems, user
expectations are different---most get their software from
their
installer systems, which of course differ greatly from system to
system,
with no common "install gnumeric" command.
I assume when you say open
desktop systems, you are referring to something like linux.
I do not know what an
installer system is. Where can we
get these required installer systems in order to get Gnumeric on the
desktop?
Unfortunately,
for the closed systems, gnumeric does not have any mac
bundle and the
windows bundle is not yet official but does have a link
which is perhaps not
prominent enough. (Official support for the windows
port leads to lots of
complications, e.g. release specific dependencies
and systematic handling of
the gtk stack.)
Portable Gnumeric has worked
on all macs except one, which was an older
computer.
What is a Windows bundle and where is
this link within it. I have no idea
what a dependency is, nor what systematic handling is, nor what a gtk stack is,
nor why an understanding of this will help me help students get Gnumeric on
their desktops.
For the open systems, we start needing system
specific responses.
How do we go about getting
these?
So yeah, freedom is messy and we may loose the
impatient---that's may be
all right in the long run if you believe, as I do,
that freedom is
contagious,
all the best,
Adrian
Again, I hope I do not come
across as being flippant. I truly
believe in the freedom you speak of.
If it is intended that open source be available only to those who are
very very patient, or are willing to learn all the technical things of which you
speak then we will continue to lose the 98% of the people we declare not
patient enough.
One final thought. Since nearly all of my students have
windows on their standalone desktops and laptops, perhaps if simple instructions
were available for that computer type . . . .
Thank you for your patience
with this numbskull teacher of statistics, graphics, and economics in real
estate applications.
George
Dell