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.
