Feature Proposal: Bundle TWikiShellContrib With Dakar by Default

Motivation

Provide a common front-end to all the maintenance scripts and those used by developers, that guarantee that all the proper settings are in place.

Some scripts (specially the unit test) require the setting of the TWIKI_HOME enviroment variable. This can become a burden if running more than one installation in the same machine (yes, a setenv.sh script or something like that can be used, but that's an extra step that can be skipped with this proposal).

Description

Bundle TWikiShellContrib With Dakar

-- RafaelAlvarez - 02 Aug 2005

Impact and Available Solutions

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Discussion:

Candidates:

• mklinks.sh (which should be in perl anyhow)
• bin/mailnotify
• any other command line script you were thinking about building for TWiki
• tests/bin/TestRunner.pl

-- MartinCleaver - 02 Aug 2005, RafaelAlvarez - 02 Aug 2005

TWikiShellContrib was updated in r6029

-- RafaelAlvarez - 11 Aug 2005

No developer scripts are shipped with Dakar; a developer is expected to work in an SVN checkout area. It's not appropriate (AFAICT) to bundle this with an end-user release - unless you can come up with a much stronger justification than the one given here. So I'm dropping it from DakarRelease.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 28 Aug 2005

I can agree with developer scripts not being bundle with DakarRelease. MartinCleaver motivation was that if it was bundled with Dakar, then somehow people would start using it. I can envision it as a way to run installers/updates (both plugins and twiki) offline, but you're right: Until it proves itself to be useful to TWikiAdmins, it shouldn't be bundled.

OTOH, "No developer scripts are shipped with Dakar" means that the release will not contain neither tests nor (most of) tools directories?

-- RafaelAlvarez - 28 Aug 2005

Right. My original reasoning was that if I had to build the test infrastructure so that it could be shipped in a release, it would have a number of knock-on effects:

1. The number/size of tests would become important, or risk bloating the release.
2. The infrastructure itself would have to be compromised to be releasable.

It should be / is easy for an interested party to install and run in an SVN checkout area. If the end user doesn't have the ability to do that, then they have no business running the tests, as they would not be able to use the results. Similarly, I did not really want to encourge "just anybody" from building a release (of core or plugins).

I know some people disagree with me on this; but I really want to achieve an environment that is light, easy to install, and doesn't come with lots of clutter.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 29 Aug 2005

I did dissagree, but you know you are right. and there is nothing stopping us from having a Test/Tools zip file for those that want to check it out (that way there would be twiki.zip, twikiplugins.zip and twikidev.zip)

-- SvenDowideit - 29 Aug 2005

I'm withdrawing this proposal. Actually, I'm starting to reevaluate the goals of TWikiShellContrib

-- RafaelAlvarez - 28 Aug 2008

My alter-ego forgot to change the state of this proposal

-- TWikiJanitor - 02 Sep 2008