[lokisetup] development status

[Ryan C. Gordon]

> There is no particular roadmap, except a vague needed rewrite of the 
> user interface code to allow for better separation. Right now it is not 
> very clean, but at least it works for what we need it for. The installer 
> is used by a lot of big names. Off the top of my head : Google, nVidia, 
> all Loki games, Codeweavers, pretty much anything that comes out of 
> icculus.org, Codehost, and more.

To flesh out the "anything that comes out of icculus.org" part:

A lot of our open source stuff uses it, but I also use it on my 
commercial endeavors: Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004 (and 2007, next 
year) use it, Google Earth uses it, America's Army uses it, Serious Sam, 
Postal 2, Lugaru, Devastation...

The Mac port of loki_setup sees lots of movement, too: Shrek 2, 
Spider-Man 2, the Unreal Tournament games, Tron 2.0, Indiana Jones, 
Cars, Facade, ArmyOps, etc...most of this is using the Linux codebase 
with a Mac GUI, so while we're explicitly discussing Linux, I mention it 
because it adds to the head count using largely the same program.

As several of these are freely downloadable, just my own Linux titles 
have easily seen over a million users of the installer, and maybe quite 
a bit more. I only have numbers for a few of the titles and still feel 
confident that my estimate is quite conservative, even before taking 
into account Mac titles on retail shelves.

It has gone a long way to help put a "professional" face on 
installation, since it's got a decent GUI interface, and doesn't have to 
get into the Linux package manager politics that RPM, deb, etc do. I 
haven't had any issues specific to a distribution in, well, ever, with 
loki_setup.

As someone else said, it has its warts, but it's pretty good overall. 
There isn't heavy development at this point, since it basically works as 
advertised now, but as we find a specific need, we add patches:

   http://cvs.icculus.org/*checkout*/cvs/loki_setup/CHANGES

--ryan.