gEDA-user: installation

[Stuart Brorson]

> My experience has been that if you are missing some system dependencies, the 
> first expect session will always fail, whether running as root or not.  This 
> may be unique to the openSuSe distributions, but I don't think so.  It is 
> more likely just an issue exposed by the fact that the openSuSe installations 
> have less of the system dependencies installed out of the box.  Maybe the 
> SuSe distributions are the best way to test the installer :)?

In general I do test on SuSE 9.3, 10.0 and 10.1, and the installer
does work on those platforms.

As for the dependency installation failing:  I have seen failures due
to several causes:

*  Users running as root.  The expect session wants to see "assword:"
when it tries to log in as root.  If the user is already root, then
the computer doesn't ask for a password.  Therefore, the expect
session just hangs, waiting for the "Password:" which never comes. 
Solution:  Don't install as root.

*  Non-english users.  This one was interesting.  A German user had
the expect session hang immediately after he started the dependency
install.  The reason was that his box asked for his password as
"Passwort:", the German word.  The expect session was waiting for
"Password:".  Therefore, it hung, waiting forever.  I haven't done
anything to fix this yet.  The fix will be for the install wizard to
set the local environment to English only upon startup.  I haven't
implemented this yet because I am not sure what kinds of problems that
might cause (what happens if no English translations are installed?)

*  The WTF catagory.  In this catagory are some occasional,
intermittant failures I see in my testing.  I don't know exactly what
causes them, but I suspect timing issues withing the call/response
process of the expect session.  With the last CD I upgraded the expect
package, so I'm hoping this problem will just go away.  But I haven't
thoroughly verified that yet, either by verifying the design, or by
rigorous testing.

Stuart