I've just finished my first draft of a "quick and clean" installation guide. This is a complete to-the-keystroke guide - start with a new computer, a blank hard drive, three CD-ROMS, and this guide, and end up with a working OpenACS installation, including ssl, full text search, a reasonably secure system, automatic backup, and a tested restoration process. In about an hour.
Although the existing documentation is in pretty good shape and clearly reflects a lot of work, I ran into four problems:
First, the installation is exceedingly lengthy.
Second, there are a lot of prerequisites and jumps to third-party pieces. Each one has a different documentation style, from READMEs in tarballs to "go to my web page" (thanks djb!).
Third, there are a lot of choices and decisions that I don't want to keep making - I just want a working, fully featured OpenACS server up and running as quickly as possible.
Fourth, I wanted to freeze something fairly stable so that I could burn a CD and know that, three years from now, I can take a fresh backup and an old CD and rebuild a server in an hour.
My installation guide sets the following as a baseline platform
- Redhat Linux 8.0
- OpenACS 4.5
- PostGreSQL 7.2.3
- AolServer 3.3ad13-oacs1-beta
- Daemontools 0.76
- OpenFTS 0.2
- nsopenssl 2.1
- Qmail 1.03
- ucspc-tcp 0.88
So my question is, is this useful to other people? If so, should it be posted on openacs.org? With the new supporting scripts? With the tarball/iso? Are there distribution issues to the tarball/iso?
The current draft, which is still sans cvs, database backup, and recovery, is at http://aufrecht.org/openacs-4.5-quick-guide.html .
