Installation Guide: Required Dependencies for Supported Operating Systems and Distributions

[shakatoday]

The installation guide currently lacks detailed information on the dependencies required for various supported operating systems and distributions. To help users set up the project smoothly, we should add a section in docs/installation.md that outlines the dependencies for each supported OS and distro (e.g., Ubuntu, Debian, macOS, etc.). This will ensure that users have a clear understanding of the prerequisites and can avoid common setup issues.

[yifanmai]

Are you running into an issue with a specific distro? I believe HELM should work on Ubuntu and MacOS; Debian hasn't been tested but I don't see why it wouldn't work.

There is a known issue that HELM doesn't work on Windows; see #2907.

[shakatoday]

Oh, sorry it's for Developer setup, so it should be docs/developer_setup.md

For Ubuntu, it's quite trivial such as build-essential and unzip.
Even though they are trivial, some open-source projects include git in their setup dependencies if a distro needs it.

This issue should be a very low priority I think.

On the other hand, do you think that the setup of cuda should be mentioned in both docs/installation.md and docs/developer_setup.md?

[yifanmai]

That's a good point. Do you have an example of documentation from another open source project that has done something similar?

Yes, CUDA setup is quite complicated, and it's worth discussing this in the documentation.

[shakatoday]

Sorry, I should have given some examples. Here are three.

• Electron. There are build-essential curl for Ubuntu. They also have different setup prerequisites for other distros.
• Android. There are build-essential zip unzip curl for Ubuntu
• OpenWrt. There are build-essential git unzip wget for Debian/Ubuntu/Mint. They also have different setup prerequisites for other distros.

Thanks for your time!

[yifanmai]

Thanks @shakatoday! I will take a look.