#162 Installation: No Icons are created and Boa isn't launched

[Christian Blackburn]

I had tried Python once before (without BOA) and
quickly gave up, because of command-line interface. I
was excited, no thrilled, to hear that there might be
something resembling Delphi available for Python. When
I read about it and saw that it received project of the
month I assumed a certain level of quality would go
with it. Frankly, I'm very disappointed.

The good news is I haven't even run the program yet,
because your installer didn't do a complete job of
installing Boa. No I didn't get any error messages,
but the whole job of an installer is to do as close to
100% of the hand-holding necessary to get your program
up and running on the screen. For example if I
download Inno Setup (another open source application -
www.InnoSetup.com) at the end of the installation it
will not only have created application icons and
desktop shortcuts, but it will give me the option of
launching the program at the end of the installation.
Your installer does none of this.

After installing BOA I had to search for files named
Boa just to figure anything out. I read a readme file
located at:
C:\Python23\Lib\site-packages\wxPython\tools\boa
which instructed me to create an (WIN32 environment
variable, not something inside of Python's command-line
right?) environment variable named "HOME" that would
include the path of folder that contained a sub-folder
named .boa. Honestly that isn't very user friendly,
but I'm not dummy I can do that. So I did, but I still
can't run Boa.

I created a variable named "HOME" that pointed to
"D:\Programming\Python" in which was a folder named
".boa". I matched the case of both the Environemnt
variable and the .boa folder.

I then tried running the following:
Every file who's name started with BOA in the
C:\Python23\Lib\site-packages\wxPython\tools\boa
However none of these seem to bring up an IDE.

I have tried running the three Python 2.3 apps and
typing in Boa at the command-line, but still no IDE.

I'm sure this package is great for a veteran Python
user, but I hope this serves as a wake up call for the
complete lack of a works out of the box experience for
newcomers.

I am not writing this to pick on anyone, in fact I
sincerely look forward to the e-mail that announces
some or all of the issues I'm experiencing fixed.
Thanks,
Christian Blackburn

[Riaan Booysen]

Logged In: YES
user_id=438

Boa is packaged with the bdist_wininst distutils utility, this
utility does not support shortcuts.

The installer wizard states that it will install to
site-packages\wxPython\tools\boa.

After that you don't need to to anything else, only run Boa.py

Boa does support using a HOME env variable, but it's not
required.

None of this is "veteran" stuff, please.

Riaan.

[Christian Blackburn]

Logged In: YES
user_id=561770

Hi Riaan,
After installing wxPython I think I noticed that it uses the
same installer. That must be easier for you guys to
distribute with. I'm willing to assume that python either
bundles with that utility or it's easily integrateable with
python. So why not place the installer inside of an
innosetup installer and let InnoSetup finish the job?
Also InnoSetup would allow you to detect the version of
wxPython installed and if it's innsuficient or non-existant
you could then display a dialog and or launch a shortcut to
download and install it. InnoSetup is freeware, extremely
easy to use and it's one best shareware (I know, highly
confusing) vertical market program or utility two years in
a row. Just about everyone that's tried another installer
swears by it. I personally found it both easier and more
powerful than the Windows Installer when it comes time to
get it to do exactly what you want. There's also three
newsgroups related to the program at New.Jrsoftware.com
where you can get all the help in the world. I will donate
my InnoSetup-based installer's code to this project if you
think it would be helpful?

Thanks,
Christian Blackburn