[texworks] "Download TeXworks" box, please test

[Atri]

Hi!

On Mon, 2011-12-19 at 07:49 +0100, Stefan Löffler wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> first of all, thanks to all who have tested this so far.
> 
> On 2011-12-18 21:37, Atri wrote:
> > Actually, I now see that Firefox since version 4.0 does not allow the
> > reporting of vendor or distribution specific information in the
> > userAgent string. This is discussed in
> > https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=591573
> >
> > So I am not sure how only based on the useragent string, one would be
> > able to distinguish between ubuntu or openSUSE for example, or even
> > detect if the Linux distribution being used is one of the two. The
> > userAgent string in both cases (Ubuntu and openSUSE) would only report
> > "Linux x86_64" (or i686).
> 
> Well, FWIW, on my Ubuntu box, it reports
> Mozilla/5.0 (Ubuntu; X11; Linux x86_64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0
> so this gets detected OK. If openSUSE (or others) adopt a different
> approach, we won't be able to detect it this way, unfortunately. But I
> don't really want to dive into Java or similar (which would require
> plugins in most cases). So if there is another JavaScript based method
> to determine the Linux distro, I'm very eager to learn about it.
> 

Sorry, it does seem like there isn't an easy javascript way of doing so
any more according to the Mozilla bug, unless the distribution decides
to differ from upstream and etch the distro name on the user-agent
nonetheless. That's why for Ubuntu it would work, while it won't for any
other upstream-compliant distribution like Fedora, openSUSE, Debian,
etc. In any case...

> Otherwise, there's still the "Check Getting TeXworks..." stuff, which
> will lead to the traditional section of the webpage (once the box is
> installed there). And there's still the possibility to "Get TeXworks
> Sources" - I'm not sure how easy this is to compile on openSUSE, but on
> most Linux distros it should be relatively simple (if they provide the
> necessary libraries).

... this is good enough, and definitely a big plus for people where it
will work, such as Windows users, etc. So a big '+1' from me! For
openSUSE an up-to-date texworks package is already a part of the main
repositories. So installing it is a matter of starting up the package
manager and ticking 'install'. I would suggest that a note be added
above the box in the webpage (for Linux users only, you can get that
from the useragent string in any case) that says something along the
lines of "Please check if your Linux distribution already provides an
up-to-date version of Texworks in the default repositories. Otherwise,
get it from here:-". Probably should be worded less technically. What do
you think?

> 
> Cheers,
> Stefan

Thanks a lot for this nice idea for improving the website.

-- 
Atri