Installation

• What is an "acceptable amount of configuration" that a distribution downoader must perform (my opinion; none)
  • in the debian package I currently ask 3 questions, and then tell the user that they need to do more manually
  1. top level url for server
  2. email address for webmaster
  3. should i install the default data dir
  4. the user needs to create a twiki user, and add themselves to the admin group
  • the last one I hope to automate soon (and then I would like all the scripts to be locked to everyone but that user, and when they login it should goto a topic that takes them through the remaining config process)

• how do we figure out which of the 3 web servers we should use? (i have not solved this in debain either)

Test Process

• Live test for content; comparison with golden content on test server.

Distribution

• Uload to distribution servers; serving distributions from TWiki.org

Bugs

• Integrating bug reporting against distributions with twiki.org bug "process"

CVSplugins:lib/TWiki/Contrib/TWikiInstallerContrib/Makefile is what i use to build the TWikiSourceForgeDistribution (and soon, the TWikiMacOsXDistribution). although this works for now and the Makefile could be improved, i'd prefer to see an Ant-based build solution

-- WillNorris - 22 Oct 2004

WIll, as you know I wrote automated build scripts for Plugins using Ant, over 2 years ago. I eventually abandoned it in favour of a bespoke perl solution, for the following reasons:

1. Ant requires Java, and the ultra-conservatives don't like Java
2. There are no other reasons.

I considered moving to make but rejected it for similar reasons; not everyone has make on their system. So I ended up with BuildContrib, which is written in pure perl. Be careful of making the same mistake I did; stick to a pure perl solution, or Genghis will ride down out of the hills and ignore you to death.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 22 Oct 2004