At the risk of being to anecdotal and ranting, but with the goal of bringing a dspace newbie perspective to the discussion about newbies....
The person running the simple installer is signing up to be the administrator for a web application. They're not installing up Acrobat Reader on their own machine. They should be able to install ~5 prereqs (svn, tomcat, mvn, cron, java). I'm certainly biased because I'm a webdev not a librarian. I haven't had trouble with the initial installation documentation (beyond mvn version issues in OSX). After installing DSpace, *configuration* is simple too---I just edit files in C:\dspace. As a second data point, we had a 4th year CS student worker install DSpace who had no web development experience before. He found it easy. I have had trouble with the *customization* documentation. How do I rebuild & reinstall just my changes so things won't take ~3 minutes? Why is DSpace versioning my stuff (.bak, .new) files, and relatedly why won't things install when I tell ant to install them? How do I debug the code with/without an IDE (can I step through code)? How to customize permissions (DS-880). How should I use version control to manage my configurations/customizations easily? How should I manage devel->staging->production deployment (& across platforms)? How can I handle multiple devel->staging->deployments on a single devel machine. Even if these were simply pointers to java/mvn/ant/tomcat/war/git/svn/whatever best practices, that would be helpful. Also, documentation doesn't count if it's in a scribd presentation, a wiki page, or at all hard to find. I think better documentation all around would help more than automated installation. This is obviously just one opinion, but rather than guessing what users are struggling with, how about polling dspace-general or dspace-tech? Of course then you may just be left with N annoying rants rather than just this one.... Best, Alex Lemann -----Original Message----- From: Tim Donohue [mailto:tdono...@duraspace.org] Sent: Thursday, May 12, 2011 10:30 AM To: Graham Triggs Cc: Mark Diggory; DSpace Developers Subject: Re: [Dspace-devel] Async releases discussion Hi Graham, On 5/11/2011 5:51 PM, Graham Triggs wrote: > On 11 May 2011 20:50, Tim Donohue <tdono...@duraspace.org > <mailto:tdono...@duraspace.org>> wrote: > > I can definitely see you point about also improving documentation. > But as DSpace is now nearly 9 years old and we still haven't found > "easy enough" documentation, I'm not sure I'm in full agreement that > we'll ever be able to provide clear enough documentation for everyone. > > In addition, the main reason for this idea of an "easy installer" > was to try and free up more of our Committer/developer time. If you > notice, we still receive a ton of dspace-tech questions regarding > installation problems (e.g. "Maven error", "Ant error", "problem > compiling", "Why am I getting this weird error when I follow the > Install instructions?"). > > > But what I still don't think we've answered properly is - who is the > audience for the documentation / installer, to what end are we > providing it, and what are the consequences of doing so? IMHO Documentation should likely have (at least) two audiences: * Novice User (never tried DSpace before, but wants to try it out and get it running relatively quickly) * Advanced User or System Admin (describes/explains all available options in great detail) Currently, it seems like our docs are a bit more "Advanced User" oriented (just my opinion), or a conglomeration of both Novice and Sys Admin with no real rhyme or reason. Don't get me wrong, it's gotten much better over time, but we can probably do more to try and cater a bit better to both audiences. The Installer would be for the following audiences (again, IMHO): * Novice users who just want to 'demo' it locally (a "very quick install option") * Other DSpace Users who would are not looking to make significant changes to DSpace, or don't have a dedicated Java developer on staff, and still want to get something like DSpace running locally (for whatever reason). I.e. users who don't really have a need for all the fancy Maven overlay stuff -- they just want out-of-the-box DSpace, and maybe if they get adventurous they'll change the theme slightly with custom CSS, or similar. > Why are people installing it locally? If you want to play with the > interface, there is demo.dspace.org <http://demo.dspace.org>. We can > provide complete, configured VMs for people that want a clean slate. > OK, I know we don't have that right now, and VMs aren't for everyone, > but there has to be a reason why someone would choose to install it, > versus the other options we do or could provide. You are right that the demo.dspace.org site can be used for Demos. But, if people *truly* want to try out DSpace completely (including doing their own configurations, and starting to learn more about all the options, etc), then they still have to install it locally. Demo.dspace.org just provides a place to "play" with the default interface & a few enabled settings. But, it still won't give you a sense of how you may want to truly use DSpace in your own local environment. To do that, you need to install it locally and play with its configurations/settings a bit. People who are evaluating DSpace might *start* at the demo.dspace.org site, but if they want to get a sense of the options available and even how easy it is to change the CSS or theme, they'll still want to eventually install it locally. I honestly still feel strongly that there is a need for an easier way to install DSpace. If others disagree, then so be it (we can always start this conversation with some of our users at OR11 to see what they think). I'm NOT saying that the way I've implemented the current "Easy Installer" is the *one-right-way* (currently, I'm bypassing Maven usage altogether -- maybe their is another option of embedding Maven & auto-running it for people, it's hard to say). This work is just a prototype of one way we could install DSpace more easily. So, if others have other ideas, I'd welcome them (and you are also welcome to help with this work if it is of interest to you or your institution -- currently this work is literally in a "holding pattern", as I have other higher priority development work that takes precedence.) - Tim ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Achieve unprecedented app performance and reliability What every C/C++ and Fortran developer should know. 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