[The E]

A quick question for the people who've been here the longest:

What are the most common causes of installation failure to date?

With Turey's, the fact that noone was around to maintain it for a rather long period of time was the main source of failure. Thus we had lots of unhappy people who got borked mediavps when the were using the installer.
And since noone had the keys to the location where the installer looked for information on what to install, it took a long time until it was fixed.

With manual installs, the main source for errors is people who are not bothering to read the instructions.

[Zacam]

The "Installer" as such also needs support for: MD5 archive and decompress checking, 7z support and the ability to utilize resuming if the server supports it.

[karajorma]

How about a set of pages on the FreeSpace Wiki?

There is a security issue with using the wiki that might be worth bringing up. It would not be hard for someone to alter the wiki to point at malware instead of FS2_Open and given that few of us ever have any reason to use the installer it might take a while before someone noticed exactly why so many users were having issues.

[Wanderer]

Wiki pages can be protected to allow only moderators and admins to have editing rights

[portej05]

* portej05 is looking through Tureys installer code

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Wiki pages can be protected to allow only moderators and admins to have editing rights

Quoted for truth. If you have an account on Wikipedia, see if you can edit the Main Page.

[Goober5000]

A quick question for the people who've been here the longest:

What are the most common causes of installation failure to date?

As mentioned, Turey wasn't around to maintain the site for ages.  So the links to "recent" FSO builds, which were hosted on his FTP, were never changed.  Now that the SCP has access, this (theoretically) is no longer a problem.

A more insidious problem is with user reliability.  Each user is in charge of maintaining the links to his own downloads, but very few of them keep up with it.  So you could have the problem where for a while the Installer didn't contain the mediaVP patch, even though the mediaVP team was perfectly capable of adding it.

And then you have situations like Blaise Russel, who seems to have dropped off the face of the earth.  Eventually, his site went dead, along with all the links to his campaigns.

There is a security issue with using the wiki that might be worth bringing up. It would not be hard for someone to alter the wiki to point at malware instead of FS2_Open and given that few of us ever have any reason to use the installer it might take a while before someone noticed exactly why so many users were having issues.

Agree 100%.  Now, I would like to think that the moderators (both wiki and forum) respond quickly to reported spambots, but regardless a wiki page should not be used for this on principle.

...and which leads me to a possible contradiction.  If we (including me) don't like the idea of using the wiki to provide external links used by the FSO Installer, then why are we allowing external links to project sites?

* portej05 is looking through Tureys installer code

That should prove interesting.

* Goober5000 makes popcorn

[karajorma]

...and which leads me to a possible contradiction.  If we (including me) don't like the idea of using the wiki to provide external links used by the FSO Installer, then why are we allowing external links to project sites?

I'm looking at this from a social engineering point of view. If you click on wiki link and an exe started downloading you'd be very suspicious of it (except for links to the builds we would wonder why there was an exe here).

On the other hand if you've run Turey's installer and find a new .exe in your tools folder, you're almost certainly going to click on it to find out what it is. I'll bet even most of us veterans would fall for that one.

While I don't consider security to be a big issue at the moment it might one day be one. Using a protected page would probably solve most of that issue though.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

There should be a list of sites that we can trust and link to in FSWiki.

[Tomo]

Couple of 'security' things that should be included anyway:
1) Executables can *only* be downloaded as Core files.  If an executable is not on the core files list, it will not be downloaded.
- If it's part of an archive it gets silently erased on decompressing.

2) Core Files page should be locked, and only editable by the moderator team.
The core files page will not change often - on release of a new FS2Open version, and when a new Mod gets added to the list - so that's a relatively small task.

Mod pages are more difficult, are there is the two-edged sword of either locking them (so more work for the mod team), or leaving them open (more likely to get defaced)

As to compression support:
gzip, pkzip (normal DOS/Windows ZIP) and 7z are all supportable under Windows at least, although I'm not sure how portable.

[TopAce]

How about a set of pages on the FreeSpace Wiki?

There is a security issue with using the wiki that might be worth bringing up. It would not be hard for someone to alter the wiki to point at malware instead of FS2_Open and given that few of us ever have any reason to use the installer it might take a while before someone noticed exactly why so many users were having issues.

It's easy to keep track of recent changes and investigate the links that have been recently added, especially by newly registered users. There's no need to restrict the page to moderators only.

[Nuke]

can executables be stored on svn? and if so would it be possible for the installer to include a lightweight svn client so it can get the latest executable?

[chief1983]

There's easier ways to manage latest builds than that.