[Developers] more clear installation info needed

[Ian Taylor]

Hi Developers,

I just got an email from somebody who was having trouble installing ADMB. In
my experience it's very smooth and easy, but I think he was hampered by lack
of clear instructions. I'm sure folks are working on improving the
instructions, but at the moment, things are pretty confusing.

 

The average new user is probably using Windows and surely doesn't want to
mess with source code.

If they go to http://admb-project.org/documentation there are no longer
installation instructions, just README.txt. If you open that file, you have
to scroll through a lot of text, past all the instructions for installing
from source code for a half-dozen systems to get to the part about binary
distributions, which says 

Binary installation instructions can be found at
"http://www.admb-project.org/documentation/".

which is no longer accurate.

 

If you type "install" into the search box on the ADMB site, you get a nice
list, including links to the nice old installation for various systems,
including clear steps and figures, but the links on these pages still point
to installers for version 9.1.

 

Also, in the past I think the MinGW installation was described as the
"recommended" version. At the moment, I think that for Windows users this is
still much easier to install than the versions for Visual C++ or Borland, so
might it make sense to still make a suggestion to help new users who may
have no idea about which compiler they wish for? Another option would be a
simple table listing features or trade-offs of the different Windows
versions to help people pick one.

 

-Ian

 

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