docs - FAQ - broken link

http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/installing.html#required-and-optional-packages
"Leo also requires --either-- the Qt widget set."

I guess it used to allow for an alternative that is now gone?

Another one. Since seeing the "should we end the practice of issuing releases" thread in GG, I decided to try bazaar for the first time rather than doing a regular download/install.

http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/installing.html#installing-leo-with-bzr

> Get Leo from launchpad by doing:
> bzr branch lp:leo-editor
> And that’s it!

Well not quite 8-)

I was very confused why the "download" checkout whatever took so long, and my leo-editor folder had a whole set of directories with hardly anything sizable in there, much less the editor executables I was expecting.

It took a fair bit of googling and doc reading for me to figure out the next step - export!

bzr export /path to target/eg/Lib/site-packages/leo-editor4 lp:leo-editor

So with that in mind, the next statement:

> When you want to refresh the code with latest modifications from Launchpad, run bzr pull.

Is that complete? Does it require the path to the "working directory" (where I exported to right?) or just the lp:leo-editor string or???

I would suggest first making a clear step-by-step for people just interested in running Leo and keeping it up to date, and then have a completely separate section for the (presumably much smaller group of) people that think they might actually be helping to develop the software.

On Sun, 27 Nov 2011 13:00:55 -0000
HansBKK <email address hidden> wrote:

> > Get Leo from launchpad by doing:
> > bzr branch lp:leo-editor
> > And that’s it!
>
> Well not quite 8-)
>
> I was very confused why the "download" checkout whatever took so long,
> and my leo-editor folder had a whole set of directories with hardly
> anything sizable in there, much less the editor executables I was
> expecting.
>
> It took a fair bit of googling and doc reading for me to figure out the
> next step - export!

You shouldn't need export, the `bzr branch lp:leo-editor` should create
a directory `leo-editor` with everything in it. I.e. a few small files
and folder `leo` where everything else is.

One of the small files in `leo-editor` is `launchLeo.py` which can be
run to launch Leo.

Future updates can be merged without the long initial download time by
running `bzr pull` in the `leo-editor` folder.

Cheers -Terry

The only instance of launchLeo.py is under /Lib/site-packages/leo-editor4, which totals 28.8 MB as a result of the export command I cited.

Running Windows 7, installed all prerequisites from MSI's and then copied to my "Portable Python" setup, which is where I ran bazaar to install Leo I only executed the two bazaar commands above.

Scripts looks like this:
leo-editor
└───.bzr
    ├───branch-lock
    └───repository
        ├───indices
        ├───lock
        ├───obsolete_packs
        ├───packs
        └───upload

and the repository folder contains the only two files:

             54 format
             72 pack-names
for a total of 126 bytes

I have an identical virgin W7 desktop I can run through the steps again and log every command if that helps. . .

I keep finding other typos and little glitches as I'm going through the docs - I'm actually browsing the leo-docs source in parallel with the HTML on the website to see how it's structured.

It would be quicker for me to just proofread and edit the source than to keep posting here, if I figure out how to do the LP crypto so I can push back would that work - not rewriting anything, just cleaning up little nits. . .

On Sun, 27 Nov 2011 18:19:53 -0000
HansBKK <email address hidden> wrote:

> The only instance of launchLeo.py is under /Lib/site-packages/leo-
> editor4, which totals 28.8 MB as a result of the export command I cited.
>
> Running Windows 7, installed all prerequisites from MSI's and then
> copied to my "Portable Python" setup, which is where I ran bazaar to
> install Leo I only executed the two bazaar commands above.
>
> Scripts looks like this:
> leo-editor
> └───.bzr
> ├───branch-lock
> └───repository

I guess there are lots of ways you could "run Leo from bzr", but the
method the docs. intend to describe does not require `bzr export`,
and does not install under site-packages. It doesn't really
"install" at all, it just creates a directory "leo-editor" wherever
you run the bzr command. Leo does not end up on the system executable
path or the python module search path. When you run Leo by running the
launchLeo.py script in .../leo-editor/ it finds all the leo.foo.bar
modules it needs because the leo folder is in the same folder as
launchLeo.py.

There should never be any need to look inside the .bzr directory.

Cheers -Terry

I remain confused, due to my lack of basic knowledge/experience with bazaar; it is likely I did something wrong and didn't follow the directions, since my understanding is that following the directions did not result in there being any launchLeo.py (or anything at all other than .bzr) in the leo-editor folder.

When I have time I'll run through it again and keep a detailed log.

In the meantime I still believe that if we want non-programmers to run from trunk rather than arbitrary releases, the user-level installation docs need clarification to support people that may have never heard of version control, much less bazaar.

I am happy to contribute to such docs if there is a clear and efficient path to do so.

In my getting to know Leo, it seems that DokuWiki's data structures (plain text in a dirstruc) would be a trivial publishing target for Leo to generate. This would allow a developer-maintained "master source" to be kept authoritative, as well as a completely open and easy-to-contribute-to wikiweb for user edits and contributions - simple difftools could be used to periodically update the master source, wipe that part of the wiki with a new authoritative "version" available for further feedback.

Sorry, just thinking out loud. . .

On Mon, 28 Nov 2011 03:13:02 -0000
HansBKK <email address hidden> wrote:

> In the meantime I still believe that if we want non-programmers to run
> from trunk rather than arbitrary releases, the user-level installation
> docs need clarification to support people that may have never heard of
> version control, much less bazaar.

Perhaps, and this would be up to Edward to ok, bzr should be
recommended only for people who want to modify the code (or are simply
familiar with bzr), and the nightly .zips should be pointed to as the
way to run from the trunk.

In that vein, we should (a) get a proper URL for Leo, and (b) make the
official nightly .zip url http://www.leo-editor.org/nightly or
whatever, just so it doesn't break if http://www.greygreen.org/leo/
ever went away, even though I can see no reason that it should.

Cheers -Terry

No need to "be afraid" of bzr :)

I say this as somebody who had very little prior experience with version control, who started to run leo from trunk early (though not immediately after leo developers started to use bzr), who started to use bzr in write mode as first distributed version control for personal pet projects and who already doesn't use it - not because bzr is bad, just because I found alternatives which I like more.

A repository is a big pile of code, many versions of same code. It keeps all the history of changes, that's why the initial download (bzr branch) takes long. It creates a local copy on your computer (that is the point of distributed version control). After that you only do bzr pull to get changes that aren't in your local copy yet.

This is enough for running leo from trunk, yet it gives you a big directory with many bzr-specific files which you may not need as read-only bzr user if your goal is to run leo only.

bzr export is different - it exports only a single revision of the code from the repository, not the whole history. It is still working code which you may use to run leo, but it's not coupled to the repository with all history anymore.

If you are used to think of programs in terms of executable files - leo is written in Python. This is a scripting language - python files are plain text files with python source code. You just run a python interpreter with launchLeo.py as argument (assuming you have python/qt and other eventually needed dependencies already installed) or use some automation tricks like batch files / file associations in windows or shell wrapper scripts to avoid typing much.

 I am used to see such discussions in google group where we can go more detailed and not keep our posts strictly technical and very short. By no means am I trying to hint that this bug report is not appropriate for launchpad - it is very valuable because it emphasises the problems leo starters have and make them more exposed to the community (which I like to think is more biased about such problems and tends to overlook them because they are shadowed by that leo experience they already have).

OK, made the time to troubleshoot the issue, turned out to be an out-of-memory error, apparently memory leakage bugs the bazaar team is working on improving. The desktop concerned is windows7 w/ 4GB, but it's 32-bit.

Workaround solution is

  bzr branch lp:leo-editor -r 1000
  cd leo-editor
  ..\bzr pull -r 2000
(rinse & repeat)
  bzr pull

Might save others a bit of googling if this is mentioned.

The original error I cited and the one in comment #1 still hold, as does my offer to help clean up the typos in the documentation if there's a relatively easy (for a non-programmer) way to do this. Otherwise should I continue posting new ones as comments to this one bug, or just post to the maillist or. . .?

Sorry, forgot to include my source of the fix (and of the bazaar bug report) https://answers.launchpad.net/bzr/+question/155775

Did you really get past revision 3087 by using "bzr pull -r"? See http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor/browse_frm/thread/2c8fa217ad1a403c for more details. The leo bzr repository is in a bad state currently and I would recommend it to very few people until it is fixed. There are only 2 ways I know of to get past revision 3087. On a Linux box with enough memory (1GB is not enough) or on Windows using bzr-over-ssh.

> Did you really get past revision 3087 by using "bzr pull -r"?

I currently don't know how to tell, so I just initiated a pull without the -r to see what happens and will come back once I've figured it out. FYI there's about 28MB in leo and almost double that in bzr, seems very odd to me that kind of size is causing problems - but what do I know?

I would suggest - unless this is a very temporary situation - that the "installing" page, "with Bazaar" section be amended, perhaps simply linking here to make it easy. That way people who don't know what they're doing with Bazaar (like me) will know to avoid using that method for now, while coders at least will have a heads' up ahead of time. . .

You're right, I didn't get past 3100. Further discussion specific to this topic here:

http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor/browse_thread/thread/9f62aa1461249f21

> The original error I cited and the one in comment #1 still hold, as does my offer to help clean up the typos in the documentation if there's a relatively easy (for a non-programmer) way to do this. Otherwise should I continue posting new ones as comments to this one bug, or just post to the maillist or. . .?

Brian - if I'm right that you're the one who was having trouble getting
bzr to branch because of memory issues, can you try branching

lp:~terry-n-brown/+junk/leo_test

without using an existing shared repository on your local machine,
using the lower spec'ed configuration you think should work (i.e. 1GB
Windows XP maybe?).

Thanks, Terry

But that link is still broken!

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 8:52 PM, HansBKK <email address hidden> wrote:
> But that link is still broken!

Right, but that doesn't affect it's importance.

Leo's to-do list, in leoPy.leo, now contains an item for this bug.
It's scheduled for fixing before Leo 4.10 final, and I may get to it
before b1.

Edward

This link was removed from LeoDocs.leo awhile ago. I just updated the web site.