Forum OpenACS Development: Re: RFC: automated installer

Collapse
Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
You're going to write a big monster script to install all the software OpenACS depends on from source? Doesn't that conflict rather directly with the desire to have those pieces installed using the system's native package management, e.g. rpm?

A more limited script to do automatically do the OpenACS setup tasks after AOLserver, PostgreSQL, etc. are already installed seems more useful to me. Especially if it cleanly supports dropping and re-creating test instances over and over again, that sort of thing. And Joel says above that at least a first draft of this already exists...

If you want to do both the AOLserver etc. install and the OpenACS config stuff, fine, put please make sure it's two separate scripts, and that the second (OpenACS config) script is parameterized enough so that it will work correctly even if you installed AOLserver and everything else from rpm or deb packages rather than from source using the first script.

For these scripts, especially in this community, going with Bourne shell rather than Tcl is a bad idea for maintenance. I've done a lot of Bourne shell programming, and Tcl is just plain better. Perhaps do the first (AOLserver etc. install) in Bourne shell if you really want to. But through its various dependencies I believe OpenACS effectively already requires that tclsh be installed on the box, so at least for the second (OpenACS configure) script I don't see any reason at all to use Bourne shell rather than Tcl.