Hi Rafel,
but I think we could give you a complete spec for the
distro every 6 months or so
Well, it's a little bit more to that then just implementing specs. I see it from our installer. Most of the time is spent on testing and configuring a reasonable "preconfigurated" data model, fixing the bug, preparing the installer and repeating the cycle. I don't know if you want to do this for dotLrn, but this was really the killer improvement for P/O, because potential customers can play around with an existing system, instead of imagining one.
So we would need support for the full [test - report - fix - build again] cycle:
- Specs, that should be fairly straight forward. Also, having a working system build according to the specs would be cool.
- Testing resources: We would need some people who could check the installer on different OSs and go through a Test Plan. They should be able to report installer bugs with a fairly high degree of insight into the system.
- Test Plan: This could be a simple one, just checking the dotLrn specific installer options. But I would recommend to include a general application testing as well to make sure that the basic application functionality is running. We've got a fairly big Excel sheet with several hundered test cases for a human tester.
- Preconfigured database contents: Do you want to offer this? This is a lot of work, but users love it, because they can _see_ a running system, and don't have to imagine one...
- "Cohabitation" with P/O: We would have to include all installation options in a single installer, similar to the current one: "Core OpenACS", "dotLrn", "Project/Consutling" and "Project/Translation" plus some preconfigured systems for each option.
- Organizing resources: I would't like a situation where we would have to ask around, begging people for help. Let's face it, "Windows" and "testing" is probably the combination of the two most boring and annoying concepts in this community. Only "documentation" could be worse...
- Apropos, what about documentation? 😊
- Release schedule: We would have to - more or less - coordinate release schedules of dotLrn with P/O. However, this should't be a difficult issue, if we asume that the Windows installer is always going to be somehow outdated.
So, this was basicly a brief writeup of the issue that we are facing...
Please keep in mind that we are no experts in the dotLrn functionality (and probably won't become).
Here are some references to previous discussions:
https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=274634
https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=213806
Bests,
Frank
