On 09-01-2013, at 11:52 AM, "Ken G. Brown" <kbrown at mac.com> wrote:
> Concentrating on making sure the downloads for separate platforms have the Readmes, image, changes, sources and VM, and being a pleasant first experience is important however.


I pretty much agree with not bothering with an 'all-in-one' at least in part because it isn't really ever going to be an *all* in one. I won't argue that Windows & Mac  don't constitute a very large fraction of the potential audience but they're certainly not not all of it.

A good download page for each platform - and maybe for sub-platforms in some cases since some linux systems have fairly strong opinions and Windows n-1 is probably wildly different to Windows n  - is essential. It ought to explain what you need to download, have clearly shown links to the correct file(s), explanations of any further actions needed (for example with RISC OS you may well need to set the FileType of the image file to STimage) and what errors you might see if you get them wrong. I'm fairly sure most platforms could have a single file install suited to the platform but we do need to remember that fairly inexperienced users may well need to fetch a new image file at some point (to upgrade, say) and need to know that a new changelog is required too. 

I'd also propose some initial startup magic that strongly advises immediately saving the image under a new name so that the original stays clean. I'm not *completely *convinced that this is required since it ought to be easy enough to re-extract a clean version from an archive but maybe not all users on all platforms get that opportunity. As an example I can see how a unix install might work by having the user start the squeak shellscript, which for a fresh start copies an image from/usr/thingy/hiddenweirdfiles/local/var/etc to the current directory before starting squeak. To restart from a fresh image by using said script they may well be ok but I think it might be valuable to have them save under a more personal name anyway just to provide some context when later helping to debug some problem. Maybe this needs to be platform dependent.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful Latin Phrases:- Utinam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant! = May faulty logic undermine your entire philosophy!