Re: Ten years (personally) of WL

[Thomas Narten <narten@us.ibm.com>]

I too have become a big fan of wanderlust (and it's only been 100
days!).

However, I think WL could have a much larger fan base if it was easier
to install and get running. I know of 3 persons who I think I could
get using it, but the getting started hump seems daunting, and I'm
hesitant to have people try if it means they spend an hour on
installation before they can even try it.

Folk here say use el-get. My experience with el-get is 1 for 4. That
is, I used it successfully on 1 of 4 different systems I tried.

On my laptop (running a distro based off of RHEL6), it didn't work at
all. I think the problem is I have an older version of git and the
server hosting el-get is picky about certificates. That is already way
more than I want to understand when installing software.

On Ubuntu, it installed pretty easily. (yeah!). And once I spent a
little time using it, its pretty cool -- but I have not found basic
documentation on how to use el-get once you have it running oriented
to someone who just wants to know the steps for installing (say) WL.

On Fedora 18, I iterated through trying to run it, with each attempt
getting a bit further. Needed git, then someone wanted cvs, then
something needed svn, eventually something wanted "autoconf" and I
gave up. When it fails, it can be hard to figure out what is needed.

I just tried installing el-get on a windows-8 machine running emacs-23
(which I just unzipped and started using). It aborts with "Could not
create connection to github.com:443" (my browser seems to connect
OK). When installing on linux, el-get at least created a buffer trace
that had errors in it. For my windows try, there is no log buffer
showing anything.

Surely there is a better way of doing this? And this better way is
documented somewhere I just haven't found yet?

PS, I'd be willing to put some cycles into documenting this, but right
now I'm at a loss as to what to recommend...

Thomas