Without these details, installation is off-putting to newcomers

[martinhbramwell]

As a newcomer to Vulcan it annoyed me to have to repeatedly back track and retry, before I could get a clean install.

[SachaG]

That's a really good write-up but I feel like the amount of steps might give the impression that the install is more complex than it actually is.

How about first adding an "Install" section that only has the basics (npm install, meteor, etc.) and then putting your detailed write-up below that in a "Full Instructions" section?

[martinhbramwell]

New commit!
Does that work better for you?

[SachaG]

Sorry for nit-picking, but is specifying environment variables really necessary? I feel like the simple install should just be as simple as possible? Other than that, it's great :)

[martinhbramwell]

I understand it makes it look more complicated than you'd like, but I have my reasons :

• Once those 3 shellvars are prepared, your Linux users will directly up and running with 4 drag'n drops,
• To be sufficiently accurate and complete, such that a new visitor perceives no ambiguity, I'd have to explain where to put things in order to be sure they got export METEOR_PACKAGE_DIRS=${VULCAN_HOME}/packages; working correctly.

I have done a lot of OSS project evaluations. If the first hour of experience proves tricky I will abandon the project much more quickly than if I'm up & running in a few minutes. You have put a huge amount of effort into documentation, videos and tutorials, so I don't think you want people tripping over mops and buckets when they try to get in the front door, especially Meteor people who expect to get there with a single command.

Actually, now I'm concerned that on the 2nd run through they're going to hit an immediate mysterious snag -- METEOR_PACKAGE_DIRS will be undefined, and the only information will be a very unhelpful stack trace.

[SachaG]

Thanks, I merged this and then simplified the quick install walkthrough myself. I think people don't need to bother with the 2-repo install method at first.

[martinhbramwell]

Great! I should have the Chimp/Cucumber example for you by early next week.