Forum OpenACS Q&A: Installers and repositories

Posted by Andrew Grumet on 03/16/05 03:52 PM

I'm starting this thread to get our various installers and repositories the support and promotion they need.

A lot of great work has already been done. Here are a few things I happen to have seen:

1. The efforts documented here:

https://openacs.org/projects/openacs/installer

2. Bart's work on RPMs

http://s5presents.com/show/191

3. Derek's work on RPMs

https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=278458

Derek's post motivated this thread. I'm new to this, but am happy to do the legwork to support these awesome contributions.

OCT members, assuming this doesn't pose an undue performance or security risk, can we put this on our production machine?

Derek or Bart, can you outline what's involved in setting these repositories up?

2: Re: Installers and repositories (response to 1)

Posted by Andrew Grumet on 03/16/05 04:09 PM

Okay, I'm playing catch up on some of this stuff. Bart's presentation has more detail, and so does this thread:

https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=273876

Bear with me while I get up to speed.

3: Re: Installers and repositories (response to 1)

Posted by Andrew Grumet on 03/16/05 05:28 PM

Okay, so from the thread linked in the last post, it's clear that setting up yum is a one-liner. I checked production and we have yum-arch installed.

Also in the other thread, Jade asked about integrating the repositories with file-storage. It sounds possible, and would give us RSS support, but would be a bit of extra work transferring all of the files in. We might be able to facilitate that with WebDav, assuming you can serve a yum repository from a different machine than the one you ran yum-arch on. Is this true?

4: Re: Installers and repositories (response to 1)

Posted by Frank Bergmann on 03/18/05 06:55 PM

Hi,

two points:

- Windows Installer:
Please add our Project/Open installer to the list of installers (http://www.project-open.org/download/win/). The installer includes the same DotLrn configuration as Vlassis installer (together with the Project/Open options). Did you contact Vlassis recently? I haven't got any feedback from him during the last few weeks

- SuSE/Novell RPMs:
We've spent several days trying to build some source RPMs for SuSE including AOLServer, but we've failed terribly. I'm going to look for the code we've created so far. We would start again if we would have some support from some real RPM wizards.

Apart from that: Please count on our help if you've got something already, starting about the 10th of April (we've got some trade fairs before that...).

Bests,
Frank

5: Re: Installers and repositories (response to 1)

Posted by Jade Rubick on 03/19/05 09:42 PM

Derek: if you tell us what you need (server access, for example), the OCT will likely give it to you. I personally am extremely happy to see these things in place. Once a few people have installed them and used them, we'll need to update the docs to use the binary installers!

I can't tell you how happy I am to see this.

Wow, we now have SOAP support and we have a binary installers? The future is looking much brighter for OpenACS..

6: Re: Installers and repositories (response to 1)

Posted by Andrew Grumet on 03/19/05 10:10 PM

A few of us chatted on IRC on how to do this.

For the yum repository at least, the simplest approach seems to be giving Derek a filesystem directory where he can push stuff to the openacs.org server over rsync.

At this point I'm tasked with configuring rsync and granting the necessary rights. I'll try to get it done over the weekend.

For Frank's and any other non-repository oriented installers, perhaps a well-publicized link out, or a local copy in a file-storage instance, is in order.

7: Re: Installers and repositories (response to 1)

Posted by Frank Bergmann on 03/24/05 09:38 PM

Hi,

For Frank's and any other non-repository oriented
installers, perhaps a well-publicized link out, or
a local copy in a file-storage instance, is in order.

Both would be fine with us.
However, the Windows installer currently has a quite
short release cycle (only 2-3 weeks), because of many
strange quirks that appear in different Windows versions.

So it would be important to include a link to the latest
version of the installer even if you maintain a local copy.
I would propose: http://www.project-open.org/download/win/.
We have just modified the page to explicitely include dotLrn.

Happy easter vacations!
Frank

8: Re: Installers and repositories (response to 1)

Posted by Frank Bergmann on 03/29/05 01:25 AM

Hi,

Binary installers are not completely supported unless the
maintainer documents the process they used to build the
installer. We want to make it easy for someone else to step
in if a maintainer stops maintaining the installers. So this
is a criteria for full acceptance from the OCT.

Just seen this. So, anybody suspicious here? I don't know if that's directed towards P/O... It seems we've got an excellent reputation 😊 For clarity: The P/O installer is completely GPLed and _does_ include all of its sources and a "howto" document that explains how to build the installer.

Are there any volunteer for preparing an installer with the newest DotLrn version?

There is actually a new version of the installer coming out with P/O Beta8 probably tomorrow, which includes improved documentation and some tests to see if port 80 is free, whether there is already PG running and whether CygWin is already installed. These were the most frequent causes for installation errors in the past.

Finally some statistics: We had about 700 downloads of the "AlphaX versions since November and there were 54 installations of the "Beta5" and "Beta7" versions in the last three weeks.

Bests,
Frank

9: Re: Installers and repositories (response to 1)

Posted by Jade Rubick on 03/29/05 07:46 PM

Frank, I linked in your installers from the official docs on HEAD.

10: Re: Installers and repositories (response to 1)

Posted by Rafael Calvo on 04/13/05 01:59 AM

The Windows installer is awsome. Althought I have not used it myself, people completely new to OpenACS tells me they get it running in 10min. Congratulations!

Rafael

11: Re: Installers and repositories (response to 1)

Posted by Frank Bergmann on 04/13/05 12:50 PM

Hi,

please make sure you use the Beta8 since it now detects previously installed web servers and PostgreSQL instances. We haven't got any complaints since about failing installations.

However, there is still an issue with loading the timezone data on XP and Win2k3 and with PostgreSQL parameters different from the default values.

Does anybody know about issues with loading large quantities of data into CygWin PostgreSQL 7.4.3?

For details on the outstanding issues please check:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?group_id=86419&atid=579555

Bests,
Frank