[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Apache conf improvements

[Dan Scott]

On 02/09/2009, Joe Atzberger <atz at esilibrary.com> wrote:

> I'm not trying to make the decision whether SSL is required for
> Evergreen or not.  In fact, I explicitly added to the documentation:
>
>     a2enmod ssl        # enable mod_ssl

If I recall correctly, that step is already in Makefile.install - and
to date, anything that can be automated easily goes into
Makefile.install and is not part of the distro-specific wiki
directions (http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=server:1.4.0:install).

The generic install instructions
(http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=generic_installation_information)
are probably wildly out-of-date, and like many pages on the wiki they
need to either be updated or possibly deleted. I could see the generic
install instructions including all of the explicit steps that are
coded into Makefile.install simply to surface all of the implicit
knowledge that is maintained there ("we need X because of Y", etc),
but boy howdy that would be a lot of work. Adding in the additional /
dropped requirements for various releases complicates things in the
generic install instructions just a bit more.

On the other hand, it would significantly help people who want to add
support for other distros (RHEL / OpenSUSE) / operating systems (*BSD,
OpenSolaris). I guess it's a question of how much effort we want to
put in that direction, and calculating the return on investment of
that particular effort (versus, say, providing more "how to develop
new OpenSRF methods and services" type documentation that would
potentially enlarge the size of our development community and welcome
new developers to the project). To date, things have been pretty much
focused on Debian/Ubuntu with Makefile.install because to this point
the primary goal has been to just get people up and running at a basic
level. I'm sure the Documentation Interest Group (DIG) has ideas about
expanding those goals (thankfully!) and there's probably room for a
discussion about what the DIGgers want to do with the wiki.

All that (mostly blather) said, welcome to the Evergreen community
Joe! It's fabulous to have you on board; I'm sure your energy &
attention to detail will be a great boon to the project!

-- 
Dan Scott
Laurentian University