Hi Alex, Thanks for the feedback, actually. It's good to get an outside opinion on all this!
On 5/12/2011 10:51 AM, Lemann, Alexander Bernard wrote: > 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. You are correct, obviously. At the same time, I still feel it'd be nice to simplify things & rework anything that seems too complex. We are trying to now cater to 1000+ DSpace institutions worldwide, all of which have differing levels of technology support. Some institutions have a technical person (or multiple) dedicated to their DSpace install. Others just have one sys admin who is in charge of most everything (DSpace and all other services) and actually may not ever "touch" DSpace much other than to initially install it, and then perform occasional upgrades. This latter example (of a sys admin who hardly ever touches DSpace) is where I've heard the most requests around simplifying DSpace installs & upgrade processes. (Sidenote: when I've been talking about simplifying 'installs' via an "Easy Installer" another parallel goal here is to see if there are ways to simplify *upgrades* as well. Again, still very early days here, and it's only just being prototyped) > 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 good feedback. I agree with working to make this all easier and/or documenting it better where it makes sense. > > 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.... I will mention that much of this is actually not "guessing". The need for easier install/upgrade processes has been reported to me by numerous folks at most every DSpace (or related) conference I've been to in recent years. So, it's not just me trying to 'guess' at things. :) But, at the same time, you've got a good point here. Maybe it is time to try and conduct another survey around what people want *most* from DSpace. Maybe this is something we can get the new DCAT (DSpace Community Advisory Team) to help us develop. https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/cmtygp/DSpace+Community+Advisory+Team - Tim ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Achieve unprecedented app performance and reliability What every C/C++ and Fortran developer should know. Learn how Intel has extended the reach of its next-generation tools to help boost performance applications - inlcuding clusters. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devmay _______________________________________________ Dspace-devel mailing list Dspace-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-devel
