[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Evergreen support on Gentoo, Red Hat EL 5 / 6, and other distros

[Dan Scott]

There have been a few threads over the past months asking about support
for Evergreen on Gentoo and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (both 5 and 6).

I currently encourage Evergreen adopters to choose either Ubuntu Lucid
(the latest long term support version of Ubuntu) or Debian Squeeze, as
these are the distributions that are most heavily used in the community
and which the developers tend to use and test with.

For short-term development and testing purposes, I would add Fedora to the
list as that's the distro that I run & develop & test with - but I would
never advocate its use in production due to its abbreviated 13-month
support cycle.

I can't encourage the use of Gentoo, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Arch, or
other distros at the moment simply because we have no active maintainers
of those distributions. I know there are sites using RHEL, but on a day
to day basis I don't know of anyone regularly installing and testing
Evergreen master (or even stable Evergreen releases) on RHEL, and thus
there is no assurance that the path to a working Evergreen install on
one of these distributions does not involve multiple undocumented steps.

However, if maintainers for Evergreen on RHEL, Gentoo, Arch, or other
distros of choice step forward to actively participate in the testing
and development and documentation process, then that greatly increases
the chance they will become a first-tier supported distro for Evergreen.
Basically, if you care about a given platform and want to help others
adopt it, put your skills to good use and you can make a significant
difference.

Note: Ben Webb's work on the Google Summer of Code project towards
providing packages for Arch, Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora should help
streamline the path to installation success for these distros - and
hopefully he will remain involved with the Evergreen community to help
maintain these packages.