Forum OpenACS Development: Re: install documentation of aolserver

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Posted by Torben Brosten on
Using the source for the install standard allows all distros to have a common basis from which to work from. It is pretty straight forward to identify dependencies and build options.. and to build scripts and installers for specific distros.

The original ACS docs used RedHat as a basis. Now, RedHat has.. RedHat Enterprise and Fedora.. The docs would be less useful to Ubuntu and FreeBSD and Windows users, for example, if they just instructed to use RPMs --not to mention that RPMs were not always available for some software required by a recent OpenACS release --libxml2 and the latest stable tcl release(s) for example.

The immediate convenience and usefulness of any specific install script is limited to the extent that it actually works without errors in a particular distro. If one happens to be using a different distro, one would have to likely learn the idiosyncrasies of 2 distros for the script to be useful --and that can require learning the idiosyncrasies of a 3rd *nix to figure out where the "norm" is.

Since Malte's script is mentioned, let's consider look at how that might break on something other than a Debian install. 1) It assumes one has installed Aolserver4.5. What if the user wants to use nsopenssl? Currently, it is not clear if nsopenssl will work with 4.5. 2) the script depends on wget. Wget is not directly available on many distros. One has to download it or know the distro's alternate (and how wget works by default since no flags are shown). 3) the script uses "make". Some distros invoke gcc with "gmake" instead of "make". 4) Did I mention that bash is not necessarily the standard shell? 5) Daemontools is problematic in certain distros or environments also. Anyway, a simple install script for 1 distro is a headache for another. Besides using an automated installer with it's own build process, one concievably could use tcl to build custom scripts that work under various distros, since tcl is fairly platform independent for our cases, but that's another install method. Anyway, to keep the docs simple, a standard was created that has value regardless of the specific distro.

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
Okay, nsopenssl works out of the box when using the CVS version with AOLserver 4.5. At least I had no problems compiling it for client sites.

As for bashing on my script, this script works on redhat (when using YUM as mentioned) along with it's latest versions, debian, ubunutu and mac "OS X" (without using the apt-get commands, because everything is installed). So saying it works only on one specific installation is, well, wrong.

Now, as for using the existing packages that e.g. Debian provides, the reason here (at least for me) is that I want to have a webserver running and not necessarily use the packages that are precompiled. Is thread support in every TCL package? I can't say for sure. What about the database and tsearch2 / ltree ? Last time I tried this with the existing packages I spend half a day to figure out they were not worth the effort (nothing worked as the were not compiled the way I needed them).

But this is something where people can go each way they want. I would still keep the link to the script in there though and link to the tarball which allows you to run "install.sh".