Some first-time user problems

[luizirber]

Hi! I learned about qri at the dweb summit during the data stewardship talk, and hit some problems while trying to set it up.

Building

I'm running Arch Linux, so I tried to follow the install instructions in this repo. They... don't work (lots of gx errors). Maybe it's better to point to "clone this repo, run make" instead?

Setup

Since the CLI tutorial is "coming soon", I checked the help message and tried to run qri setup. I was surprised when it tried to use my IPFS default repo. I'm aware that this is probably not the initial experience for someone who never learned about IPFS before, but maybe move the qri IPFS repo into $HOME/.qri? (I ended up running IPFS_PATH=~/.qri/repo qri setup)

(maybe this was supposed to be seamless, but I'm running a repo which is already on 7 and qri is in an IPFS version that expects 6).

$ ./qri setup  
choose a peername: [orange_red_shih_tzu]: 

error creating IPFS repo: ipfs daemon is running. please stop it to run this command

$ systemctl --user stop ipfs

$ ./qri setup               
choose a peername: [sapphire_blue_airedale_terrier]: 

repo not available (are you running qri in another terminal?)

$ ./qri setup  
repo already initialized

$ ./qri setup --remove
error opening local filestore ipfs repository: Your programs version (6) is lower than your repos (7).
Please update ipfs to a version that supports the existing repo, or run
a migration in reverse.

See https://github.com/ipfs/fs-repo-migrations/blob/master/run.md for details.

$  rm -rf ~/.qri 

$ IPFS_PATH=~/.qri/repo ./qri setup
choose a peername: [razzle_dazzle_rose_american_eskimo_dog]: 

set up qri repo at: /home/luizirber/.qri

[b5]

👋, thanks so much for this detailed feedback @luizirber! A bunch of the team is on holidays for this week & next, so some of the work mentioned here may not be accomplished for a while.

I'm running Arch Linux, so I tried to follow the install instructions in this repo. They... don't work (lots of gx errors). Maybe it's better to point to "clone this repo, run make" instead?

We've got a long way to go on our linux install story (not nearly as long as windows 😉). Totally agreed on the "clone this repo, run make" change. In the future I'd like to include tarballs that have all deps with each release. Looks like we have two

Since the CLI tutorial is "coming soon" ...

we'll prioritize a small CLI tutorial next for documentation work.

but maybe move the qri IPFS repo into $HOME/.qri? (I ended up running IPFS_PATH=~/.qri/repo qri setup)

Thanks so much for this feedback. I go back & forth on using the default IPFS repo or not, and gathering user expectations really helps here. First we'll be upgrading our code to the lastest go-ipfs release in the second half of August, which will resolve the repo issue. As for using a completely separate repo for qri's IPFS stuff, it's a discussion we should absolutely have, I think it may solve many problems, but will create others, so it's worth weighing the pros & cons.

With that, I think this is the minimum feedback to incorporate to call this issue closed:

• Open an issue to discuss default IPFS repo / IPFS_PATH usage
• Open an issue for attaching tarballs with deps to our releases
• update docs for linux installation instructions that tell users to "clone & make"
• Get a bare-bones CLI tutorial up & running
• Update our deps to the latest go-ipfs (min version 0.4.17)

Thanks again Luiz, your feedback is truly appreciated!

[b5]

This issue has been around for a while, here's a report back before we close it:

• I've opened releases should include complied tarballs for common architectures #644 to address attaching tarballs to releases, we have a clear path to getting that started, just need to do the work
• we've included instructions for building from source that should generally help with installation.
• re: default IPFS repo usage, this is a more complicated question I'd like to take on as part of a broader transition to being able to have Qri work out-of-process with IPFS and instead use the HTTP core-api, which is under active development. This one is going to take a while, but for the foreseeable future, I'd like to honor the IPFS_PATH value, and only work with that. I don't think Qri should be creating a separate IPFS repo

Thanks again for taking the time to file an issue @luizirber. It's taken us a while but we have managed to incorporate your feedback. Much appreciated.