[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Server Installation

[Dan Scott]

On Thu, 2009-11-12 at 12:45 +1100, Harbottle, Joel R wrote:
> Hi Jason,
>  
> Would this be able to put on the list of things for development
> sometime? I think this could help many libraries.

Hi Joel:

This (making the Evergreen core server components run on Windows) is not
on my personal development priority list. But if someone were to come
along and ensure that all of the core Evergreen code compiles cleanly,
and that all of the dependencies and Perl modules integrated and ran
correctly, wrote install instructions, and offered to maintain the
Windows bits & provide support on the mailing lists / IRC, then we
wouldn't turn that person down.

It's just a lot of work that I (and I suspect the rest of the
development team and contributors) don't want to take on personally as
there's very little concrete benefit from such an effort. I'd much
rather spend what little time I have to contribute on squashing bugs,
writing documentation, and adding more features to the existing
platforms on which it runs.

I would love to see people step up and adopt other Linux and BSD distros
like RHEL/CentOS, Fedora, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. There are only five steps
required:

Step 1 is to adapt the Makefile.install for OpenSRF to your distro.

Step 2 is to adapt the autotools to your distro (if necessary).

Step 3 is to repeat steps 1 and 2 for Evergreen Makefile.install and
autotools.

Step 4 is to document the complete installation process on your distro,
including required changes to system configuration like SELinux
policies. 

Step 5 is to submit all of the diffs from steps 1 through 4 as a patch,
and get some other people to test them out on both the new distro, and
ensure that the patches don't break support for the existing supported
platforms.

Ideally, step 6 would be to create a virtual image so that other people
can poke around and figure out the pieces that you forgot to document
because you know the platform so well :)

Also, ideally around step 6 is the "help support other people trying to
follow in your footsteps".

Even without providing full support for other distros, we've had some
great contributions from people who have been working towards running on
other distributions - Wiktor at McMaster University comes to mind, as he
was the first to run into & figure out the problem with newer versions
of ejabberd, and Bill Erickson was able to quickly commit a patch that
resolved the problem not just on Fedora, but also for Ubuntu 9.04 and
higher.