| Hello Q;
<<Most of the annotations are just stating the obvious and are unnecessary, clicks already have audio cue's. You should only need to annotate right clicks, explanations of why you are doing something or keyboard shortcuts.>>
Tutorials should be understandable by the lowest common denominator, from a person who has never used Eclipse to a seasoned programmer. Never assume someone should know something or it is going to bite you.
<<Recommending the user messes with the patternsets to (partially) work around a bug that has already been fixed in the nightly builds is bad advice, especially for a tutorial that will be watched at some time the future when this is no longer necessary. It would be better to explain that there was a bug at the time of writing in stable, and you are using nightly to resolve it. State the build number you are using and say that any stable build after that is fine to use.>>
Recommending that user use a beta build of a product to become familiar with using the product is a recipe for disaster. Nightly builds are beta builds at best, alpha at worst. I have seen many times on the list an email from someone who installed a nightly build only to be bitten by a different undocumented bug.
<<Here is what I would do for installing 5.3 on windows without needing 5.2:
1. Extract the entire contents of the WebObjects Runtime, and put it under C:\apple
Rather than leave this as an exercise to the reader you can do this like so: 1.4 Extract WebObjectsRuntime.pax.gz: dd if=WebObjects5.3.3Update.dmg bs=0x1000 skip=0xb12 of=WebObjects.pax.gz (unzip Webobjects.pax.gz using 7zip or similar into c:\apple\WebObjects.pax) from C:\apple run: cpio --extract < WebObjects.pax remove WebObjects.pax (You should only ever need to do this once, after that you can zip up C:\apple and copy it wherever you need it)
2. Set the windows environment variables like so: NEXT_ROOT = C:\apple NEXT_LOCAL_ROOT = C:\apple NEXT_SYSTEM_ROOT = C:\apple\System
3. Delete any existing ~\Library\wobuild.properties
4. Install and run wolips (currently nightly).
5. That is all.>>
I will look into this. If this is indeed a valid way to install for windows I would ask that you write a how-to in the WebObjects WIKI.
<<From an eclipse point of view there shouldn't be any need to have different tutorials between different platforms, everything in eclipse should work the same on all platforms without any special instruction. If this isn't the case, then it is possibly a bug that needs to be filed in jira.>>
While this should be true in theory, it is not in practice. I agree whole heartedly, it should work on any platform (Linux, BSD, OS X, Windows, etc) out of the box. There should be installs for each Operating system or at the very least each type (UNIX, Windows, etc). But this is not the case.
Did you try and install WOLips using the tutorial instructions? If you did, did it produce the correct results? Were you able to run WebObjects after following the tutorial? I believe the point of the tutorial is to get people up and running, I believe it accomplishes that goal.
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