Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Community Bid: RPM's for RedHat

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Posted by Lamar Owen on

Well, money for it, huh. As RPM maintainer for PostgreSQL, I can say this much: if I were to do up a set of RPMs for OpenACS+AOLserver for pay, it would take more than $100 to get me to do it. But that's just me.

When I built PostgreSQL RPM's for Great Bridge I got that much per hour -- and it took many hours.

Having said that, most of what you want can be done, and I was planning on doing it. If I get there first, I wouldn't mind the money, although it really isn't necessary to give me any money, as long as I'm doing it for open source purposes.

Now, your specific requirements:
First, AOLserver RPM's will need to be built. This shouldn't take long to do, actually. The hard part is making them LSB compliant.

Next, requiring AOLserver and PostgreSQL from RPM is reasonable, and very easy to do with RPM's 'Requires:' structure.

Now, the second requirement is a little more dicey. The 'personal details' would include, I presume, the name for the server, where to put the data, etc. Then it would need to copy the default instance of OpenACS to the target directory, create a database with proper permissions (and if necessary create a user for AOLserver in the database), and then write out a .tcl config file for that server instance. It would be up to the user to determine how best to start the actual OpenACS server, though.

Now, this same web script would be useful for creating ANY OpenACS instance, not just the first one....

Anyway, it's more than $100 worth of work, IMHO. But I was going to do it anyway -- just haven't had the chance. If somebody else gets there first it won't hurt my feelings, either. 😊