OpenRefine/openrefine.org

Advertise alternate OpenRefine packages

Closed this issue · 1 comments

OpenRefine is packaged outside of the official repository for several platforms:

I think it would be worth advertising those ways to install OpenRefine in our download page and docs. Specifically, I would like to change the download page to mention the install methods which are relevant to the users' operating system. For instance, when we detect that the user is using Mac OS, we should advertise the homebrew install as well.

For each of those packages, it is worth evaluating whether they are updated frequently enough, and whether the packaging workflow is trustworthy. Normally, the steps taken to build the package can be looked up from the package repository, which should give sufficient reassurances.

This issue is more general than #138 which was specifically for the DEB package.

We could work on this issue by improving our OS detection. We already depend on the ua-parser-js package via Docusaurus: we should call that instead of our custom detection script:

function selectBestPlatform() {
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Win") != -1)
return 'win-with-java';
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Mac") != -1)
return 'mac';
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("X11") != -1)
return 'linux';
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Linux") != -1)
return 'linux';
// by default, assume Windows
return 'win-with-java';
}

According to the documentation of ua-parser-js, it can return such values as operating system:

AIX, Amiga OS, Android[-x86], Arch, Bada, BeOS, BlackBerry, CentOS, Chromium OS,
Contiki, Fedora, Firefox OS, FreeBSD, Debian, Deepin, DragonFly, elementary OS, 
Fuchsia, Gentoo, GhostBSD, GNU, Haiku, HarmonyOS, HP-UX, Hurd, iOS, Joli, KaiOS, 
Linpus, Linspire,Linux, Mac OS, Maemo, Mageia, Mandriva, Manjaro, MeeGo, Minix, 
Mint, Morph OS, NetBSD, Nintendo, OpenBSD, OpenVMS, OS/2, Palm, PC-BSD, PCLinuxOS, 
Plan9, PlayStation, QNX, Raspbian, RedHat, RIM Tablet OS, RISC OS, Sabayon, 
Sailfish, Series40, Slackware, Solaris, SUSE, Symbian, Tizen, Ubuntu, Unix, 
VectorLinux, WebOS, Windows [Phone/Mobile], Zenwalk, ...

We could use that to advertise more fitting options as suggested above.