Do we need something like RMS_Update for Windows?

[markmac99]

RMS_Update does more than just update from github, eg rebuilding code, cleanup of old files, making sure all libs are installed.

Do we need something similar for Windows?

[dvida]

I wonder if we'd have to do it a different way - compile binaries ourselves and distribute them, which is the usual window route. Having an RMS installation exe is probably what 99% people expect.

[markmac99]

I wonder if we'd have to do it a different way - compile binaries ourselves and distribute them, which is the usual window route

Ive done this quite a bit for various python tools. See for example this tool which i use to analyse fireballs. It has advantages but it also has disadvantages,

For core RMS the main advantage would be a single download with everything prepackaged and frozen so no version compatability to worry about. However making sure that everything is prepackaged can be quite time consuming, and its easy to miss something, or for some baseline requirement (eg MSVC runtimes) to be forgotten because you installed it years ago on your PC. I get round some of this by doing my builds via GitHub Actions which present a blank Windows for each build, but I am involved in several other Astro projects, and I have seen there how complex it can get.

On top of that we'd need to create packages for each utility - SkyFit2, Reprocess, MakeTimelapse, GenerateMP4s etc etc that could be run independently, and i think that would be painful and overlooked unless we automated it!!

[dvida]

Agreed, and given the rapid development and the open source nature of the project, distributing the code is not a bad idea after all :)