Forum OpenACS Development: Re: RFC: automated installer

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Posted by Jeff Davis on
I think it's easier to write a portable Tcl installer than a sh based one (it's easy to end up using flags not supported everywhere or depend on commands that don't exist in some OS's). For a Tcl based install we could do it with a tclkit and there are tclkit binaries for pretty much any platform I think people are interested in.

Otoh, you can definitely exit on errors with a shell script

set -e
does that and you can use the trap command to catch the error (although I think that is a bash-ism and you cant trap ERR with vanilla sh).

I would like to see packages for .debs, .rpms, and ebuilds and any of the half dozen other package managers people use.

I suspect the best way to get there would be to have a place in CVS where we keep the source for building with the various package tools (for example there are a set of ebuilds to install all the aolserver stuff + openfts and writing an openacs ebuild would be pretty easy). Maybe we should create an openacs-4/etc/installers/DISTRO directory and under that have the source for generating the various packages/build scripts. If we get them working well then I imagine they will get pulled into more standard distributions.

Another alternative would be to try harder to become the maintainers of aolserver and openacs on various standard distributions. The problem seems to be that the people maintaining aolserver for the various distributions where it is present are not really very good at keeping up to date. I don't know how hard it would be to get commit on gentoo and debian for example, and I don't follow fedora at all.

Anyway, there are a lot of options; I think getting things into standard distributions is important but I don't know how it will happen until some people here get commit to maintain the necessary packages.