Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Install

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5: Re: Install (response to 1)
Posted by Joel Aufrecht on 03/02/03 02:48 AM
  1. I think this should be a canonical list per version of OpenACS. The reason is that, if not everything is backwards compatible (like, say, PostGreSQL 7.2 vs 7.3), you can easily get into the table-leg failure mode. (When one table leg is longer than the others, so you saw it down, but now it's shorter, so you saw down the other three, but they're still not exactly right, and you keep going until you have a one-inch-high table). That is, you can be forced to upgrade a lot of interlinked components.

    So this means that the list lives in the documentation in the OpenACS tarball. Currently OpenACS.org publishes the documentation for the version of OpenACS that it's running; I think it should instead link to documentation from each release.

  2. As a starting point for the list, I offer my list from my own install doc, which I was already planning to integrate into the official documentation. I ned people to send me things it's missing. It's missing stuff like nsxml because my doc assumed you would get all that stuff from Red Hat 8.0. Which brings me to my next bullet point:
  3. Reference Platforms. A reference platform is a complete list of software, sources for that software, file locations, settings, and instructions to put it all together. Its purpose is, well, to be a reference. It lets you reproduce the documented setup reliably, and if your platform differs, it will differ from a constant instead of a variable (or, worse, an "undef"). I think this deserves a seperate forum post.
  4. Escrow. Lars' request, which just having a list of sources doesn't address, is how to ensure availability for all the sources even if their authors stop providing support. I propose (and built, for my own nefarious purposes), a Reference Platform Tarball (and ISO) that, license permitting, collects all the required software and stores it on openacs.org in conjunction with the matching OpenACS tarball.
  5. What about HEAD? When people change software requirements for HEAD, where do they document that? I suggest that goes into the HEAD version of the core doc.