With the new full release promised to arrive this month I’d like to address the distribution issue. Last time I checked the latest official release (1080) you had basically only two options to get your hands on it. First, downloading the installer program or, second, download via subversion. Since going through the whole SVN hassle is quite annoying the installer clearly would be the preferred way of getting 1.13 onto your machine.
But honestly, the last release’s installer sucked big time. That dumb software trying to be smart annoyed the hell out of me. It would not even install where I wanted it to. Instead, it checked the destination folder for a ja2.exe file assuming you’re that much of an idiot to not even know where to install that thing. This eventually got me firing up notepad and creating an empty file just to satisfy the installer. Besides from that there were also smaller issues but forgive me for not remembering the details. Afair it also created registry entries for un-installing purposes as well as start menu shortcuts without giving you an option to uncheck them or something, but in this case chances are that I don’t remember correctly. I’d like to see a tool that just gives you the damn files and nothing more.
In conclusion what I’d like to ask for is as simple as offering a zip/rar/anything-as-long-as-it-doesn’t-self-extract archive in addition to the installer packages. Please, no more SVN exports.
Posted by v113watch 