[Developers] more clear installation info needed

[Jim Ianelli]

I'll second that.  As one who rarely rtfm, this morning I went to do an 
installation on a colleague's machine using the latest version and had a 
very frustrating time.

The steps I took (which I think are natural ones...but that's my opinion):
1) went to admb-project.org
2) clicked on downloads
3) saw 9.1 in "navigation panel"
4) thought I should get newer version (maybe a bad thought) so went back
5) clicked on 10.1 released in news but then no live links so cut and 
pasted http://www.admb-project.org/downloads
6) got back to step 3)...wtf...
7) went to IDE pages (was what I was after anyway)
8) got 64 bit version
9) installed it on a fast govt 64-bit machine
10) tested it and it ran about 4 times slower than my own personal 
laptop running
11) the "new" version also is missing version number when using the -? 
option.

Whole thing shouldn't be so crappy.

And why so slow?  Compile times and run times using gcc 4.5.2.

Cheers,
Jim

On 6/29/2011 11:19 AM, Ian Taylor wrote:
>
> 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 system s 
> to get 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 abo ut which 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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