Should we rename the "generic" bundle?

Since we started bundling builds the way we are now (generic, Mac,
Windows), I’ve encountered a number of Windows users who downloaded the
generic bundle when they should have downloaded the Windows bundle, and
were quite confused by it. I’ve been thinking about whether we could rename
our install bundles to head off this confusion. One tack we could take is
that we could rename the generic bundle to “Linux”. That would completely
solve the problem of Windows users not knowing which bundle to install, but
it annoys me because it’s inaccurate. The generic bundle is not only for
Linux, but also for BSD, or for installation on a memory stick which will be
used on multiple platforms, and so on. I suspect that intentional users of
the generic bundle who are not using it on Linux are going to be fairly
advanced users who would not be confused by having to use the one labeled
“Linux”. Another possibility would be to have a bundle labeled “Linux” and
another (identical) one named “other”, and that might also solve the problem.

Thoughts?

How about calling it “Other”?

rk

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Thus spake Rodney Kinney:

I thought about that, too, but concluded that doing so would make it
appear that we don’t support Linux.


J.


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I would just call it linux. The people who are doing unusual installs will be smart enough to work it out. (As opposed to the windows users who choose an installer named generic rather than one named windows!).

B.

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On 26/02/2009 at 11:24 PM Joel Uckelman wrote:


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Agree w/ Linux

Theoretically on new web site there would be a description accompanying each
d/l link? So there would be the place to explain the multi facet use of the
Linux build for users using flash drives/multi platform etc…

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On Feb 26, 2009, at 1:41 PM, uckelman wrote:

OK. At one level it’s hard to have a lot of sympathy for Windows
users who don’t download the clearly marked “Windows” version.

But more constructively, perhaps just changing the order of
presentation will head off those problems?

Where are they getting it from? It seems that the link on the forum
is very clearly labeled as to operating system. Are they just getting
it directly from the sourceforge site?

Looking at that site, I can see a potential problem, since the labels
for the downloads there are
Any
Mac Universal (PPC/x86)
Platform-Independent
i386

So if hey look at that rather than the file names, there really isn’t
any good clue that you really want “i386” to get a windows
installation. I assume that the files will always be in alphabetic
order, so windows will come last. But is there an easy way to change
the “Architecture” field to read “Windows (i386)” instead?


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Thus spake Thomas Russ:

Yes, I believe so.

No. That’s set from a drop-down list. There’s no way for us to change
what’s available in that list. (And anyway, Windows has nothing to do
with the architecture.)


J.


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On Feb 27, 2009, at 1:57 AM, Joel Uckelman wrote:

I feared as much.

And although Windows doesn’t really have to do with the architecture,
that is the sort of technical detail that is presumably lost on the
people who are getting confused on the download. And there should be
some mention of the OS in the tags, since both MacOS and Linux operate
on the i386 architecture and presumably the windows download is what
you run on AMD processors… But that’s source-forge’s problem, I
guess.

Perhaps a better plan would be to try not to steer people to the
SourceForge website for downloading Vassal, but rather have them go
through something on the Vassalengine.org site. The download page
looks like it needs to be updated anyway, since IIRC we really are
discouraging the jnlp solution, but it’s still prominent. I assume
that is part of the new website design anyway.

But perhaps as an interim measure, links to the 3.1 code could be put
there, where better wording would steer people away from the wrong
downloads.


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Thus spake Thomas Russ:

Until we move to the new site (I’m thinking ca. 2 weeks, right now) we
need download links for 3.1 on the old site. That’s something Rodney
would have to do.


J.


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I’ll post download links to v3.1. It would be really nice to build installers for the earlier versions too, so we can take down all the jnlp links.

rk

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Thus spake Rodney Kinney:

Are there any earlier versions which we actually want people to install?
I could do this, but I’m not sure that many people would benefit from it.


J.


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Thus spake Rodney Kinney:

I created a ‘linux’ and and ‘other’ bundle (the latter just being a copy
of the former, right now), fixed a problem with the 32x32 icon, and released
3.1.0.

Go ahead with adding the download links.


J.


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I would be in favour of removing the older versions entirely and having only 3.1.0 available; Unless there’s a compelling need. This way if people are having trouble with compatibility with 3.1.0, we will know about it. We’re not going to know that module X doesn’t work with 3.1.0 if the users are sticking with Vassal 3.0.17.

I would just stick with Linux and ditch ‘other’, seriously.

I don’t think worrying about semantics is worth the extra hassle and potential confusion. The two people who run Vassal on their Free-BSD boxes are gonna know what to do. :laughing:
They will know that something with a Linux tag will work on their system. If I was running BSD I wouldn’t even know the difference.

Thus spake “bsmith”:

Some Mac OS X users (10.4 and before?) have no version of Java 1.5+
available, and so can’t use anything after 2.9.9. For them, we should keep
2.9.9 available.


J.


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I think I’ve found a technical solution to the problem of users downloading the wrong bundles for their computers. When you connect to a site with your browser, it reports a User Agent string, which will contain the name of your OS (unless you’ve done something to change what your browser reports). If we display a link to the VASSAL bundle which is appropriate for the OS which the browser reports in the User Agent string, then odds are very good that this will be the bundle that the user should download.

The exceptions to this would be:

  1. The User Agent string misreports the user’s OS. No serious browser does this by default, that I know of.
  2. The user is downloading VASSAL on a computer which uses an OS which is different from the one where he intends to install VASSAL.

Both of these are pretty unlikely, I think, and in those cases, the solution is to go to the downloads page rather than use the quick link on the front page.

I’ve implemented this on the new front page. If you browse to test.nomic.net/ the quick download link you see should match the OS your browser is running on. This way, Windows users will have to go out of their way to get the wrong bundle.

On Mar 1, 2009, at 6:29 AM, Joel Uckelman wrote:

10.3 goes up to Java 1.4
10.4 goes up to Java 1.5
10.5 goes up to Java 1.6

10.5 is he current version, although rumors of a new release later
this year of 10.6 “Snow Leopard”.


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I’m not familiar with this. Is there a reason why Mac users would stick with 10.3? Is this a hardware issue?

  • M.

2009/3/2 Thomas Russ <tar@isi.edu (tar@isi.edu)>

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Thus spake Michael Kiefte:

If I remember correctly, there is no PPC build of OS X after 10.3, but
the first Java 1.5 JRE was released for OS X 10.4. Therefore, if you have
a PPC-based Mac, you have no upgrade path which does not involve shelling
out a lot of money for a new Intel-based Mac (or giving up on Apple and
installing Linux on your old Mac).


J.


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On Mar 2, 2009, at 10:31 AM, Michael Kiefte wrote:

Somewhat.

The system requirements for various OS versions are a bit different.
For example, if you have a G3 processor based computer, you are
limited to OS 10.4 or earlier. You cannot install 10.5 on a G3
processor (or a slow G4 processor).

And this gets rather compounded by Apple’s OS sales policy.
That’s because if you didn’t by the 10.4 for your old machine when it
was current, you can’t buy it from Apple anymore. So that leaves you
stuck if you have an older G3 machine, unless you go to the second-
hand market for the operating system. And some people may be leary of
that.

In my case, I am somewhat limited in my old machine, because I
installed a faster processor, and the control software for that one is
limited to certain Mac OS versions. The last two minor release
versions of OS 10.4 are not supported, so any upgrade would lose the
additional processor speed. I actually still have OS 10.3.9 installed
on it, and since it is an older G3 processor and I didn’t want to have
to worry about being careful with the OS updates in 10.4

But I do have another, more recent but hardly new machine.

So I suspect that there may be some demand for the 2.9.9 version.
Although that will start to evaporate as I would expect that most of
the newer game modules would not work with that version of Vassal.

But in any case, I always think it’s a good idea to keep old legacy
versions available, just to handle the occasional legacy needs.
(Unlike Apple’s OS!)


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