Overly dramatic appearance on windows on first contact

[mih]

I installed it and naively typed datalad-installer:

C:\Users\mih>datalad-installer
2021-12-18T14:55:30+0100 [INFO    ] datalad_installer Writing environment modifications to C:\Users\mih\AppData\Local\Temp\dl-env-exlo4d0e.sh
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Program Files\Python39\lib\runpy.py", line 197, in _run_module_as_main
    return _run_code(code, main_globals, None,
  File "C:\Program Files\Python39\lib\runpy.py", line 87, in _run_code
    exec(code, run_globals)
  File "C:\Users\mih\AppData\Roaming\Python\Python39\Scripts\datalad-installer.exe\__main__.py", line 7, in <module>
  File "C:\Users\mih\AppData\Roaming\Python\Python39\site-packages\datalad_installer.py", line 2158, in main
    return manager.main(argv)
  File "C:\Users\mih\AppData\Roaming\Python\Python39\site-packages\datalad_installer.py", line 682, in main
    self.addcomponent(name=cr.name, **cr.kwargs)
  File "C:\Users\mih\AppData\Roaming\Python\Python39\site-packages\datalad_installer.py", line 731, in addcomponent
    component(self).provide(**kwargs)
  File "C:\Users\mih\AppData\Roaming\Python\Python39\site-packages\datalad_installer.py", line 1133, in provide
    raise RuntimeError(f"No viable installation method for {self.NAME}")
RuntimeError: No viable installation method for datalad

Maybe this could become a message without a traceback? Or even something informative, suggesting possible mitigations?

[yarikoptic]

@jwodder WDYT? indeed it sounds a bit melo-dramatic. Can't it become a sequence of installations which would mimic something (didn't test) like

datalad-installer git-annex -m datalad/packages miniconda datalad -m conda-forge

?

[jwodder]

@yarikoptic I think we should move away from a "default" operation when datalad-installer is invoked without arguments, as we'll never get something satisfying for all uses; running just datalad-installer should just show a usage/help message.

[yarikoptic]

may be... not yet convinced since I think it should be feasible to just run datalad-installer datalad on pristine freshly installed box and get result quite consistently. But I wonder if overall this relates to #46 since IIRC and following http://handbook.datalad.org/en/latest/intro/installation.html?highlight=installation we need standalone (not in conda) installation of git for git-annex to operate Ok. But I could be wrong.