From c16499fe25906c48158ce25331d424d02c50707e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: zooko <>
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2010 07:20:08 +0000
Subject: [PATCH] add summary of the goal of quickstart.html

[Imported from Trac: page Packaging, version 22]
---
 Packaging.md | 2 ++
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)

diff --git a/Packaging.md b/Packaging.md
index 3b77217..ede942c 100644
--- a/Packaging.md
+++ b/Packaging.md
@@ -9,6 +9,8 @@ The setup method that we offer to people when we don't know what platform they a
  * The quickstart.html should *not* instruct the user to install any dependency if the build system could instead satisfy that dependency automatically (currently, as of 2010-09-18, the only dependencies that can't be satisfied automatically are python, and pywin32 which is needed only on Windows).
  * The quickstart.html is intended to be as simple as possible. Options (you can do it this way or that way as you prefer) or branches (if you are in this situation do this, else do that) are strongly discouraged from being written into quickstart.html. If at all possible, please move those to [AdvancedInstall](AdvancedInstall).
 
+The goal is that if the user starts with a system that has nothing installed on it (no Python, no compiler, etc.), but it has a network connection, they can follow the instructions in quickstart.html, which instruct them to install Python, and pywin32 if they are on Windows, and download the Tahoe-LAFS source code, and run `python setup.py build`, and then they'll have a `bin/tahoe` that works.
+
 ### binary .egg's of dependency native-code packages
 
 For quickstart.html to work on your platform there *must* exist a binary .egg for your platform of every dependency which has a native-code extension module. Currently those are: pycryptopp, zfec, pywin32, and PyCrypto. If there is not a binary .egg available of one of those packages for a given platform then this is a bug which prevents quickstart.html from working on that platform. (Note: if you already had that Python package installed on your system then you would be able to setup Tahoe-LAFS even if there is not a binary egg of that Python package available, e.g. if you manually installed the package already or if you installed the package already using an operating system packaging tool like apt-get. Nonetheless, since we can't rely on the user having done that and since quickstart.html cannot instruct the user to do that (see the section about quickstart.html above), then the absence of a binary .egg of a dependency for a platform is a bug preventing quickstart.html from working on that platform.)