Greetings! There was some discussion on this list recently about building a Midgard installer program on the ideas presented in Mark Constable's buildmg utility. While AFAIK no one has yet volunteered to work on it, I think it is a great idea as installation is still the weakest point in Midgard. I was looking at the Helix GNOME installer (http://www.helixcode.com/desktop/screenshots.php3#installer) today, and thought that they had some nice ideas towards building an application set -specific installer utility that would offer a nicer front-end to installing the packages than the distribution-level one would, even while still being able to use the normal packaging format used by that platform. The buildmg was a quite simple shell script. However, to present the user with a more usable interface (and possibly even an optional GUI), it would be more suitable to use a more complete scripting language - Python and Perl come to mind. I don't have much experience in either myself, but would be glad to help if someone were to take most of the programming responsibility there. Here is one possible approach for how the installer could work: -Figure out / prompt the user for operating system platform (needed for platform-dependent configurations and a possible choice of packaging formats to use) -Prompt user for installation media or a download site (the script should be able to use either) -Every download directory, both offline and online should contain a XML file describing the available Midgard version and URLs for files needed for installing that. If the particular Midgard version would need some patching to other programs (apxs comes to mind), those patches should also be listed and available (this is something that would make the installation much simpler even *without* the installer program, BTW.) -The installer should contain a XML file listing all available download mirror sites with details on location, etc. included. The installer should also be able to update this file from our primary server -Present user a choice of available versions / package formats depending on the package list XML file found from the chosen installation site / directory -Fetch the needed packages and extract them to a temp directory (or possibly a user-defined one) -Prompt for MySQL information (file locations, passwords) and construct the database -Apply needed packages to Apache/apxs and possible other programs needing those -Try to compile (or install in case of binaries) the packages. Some error handling would be nice here but possibly difficult to implement (?) -Prompt for final configuration information (Midgard admin passwords, host names) and startup Apache & Midgard -Install Admin site and other user-selected applications (the example site) as Repligard packages. Now, this kind of model would require a bit more work to implement than just a plain-and-simple installer, but would probably be much more flexible and usable in later points, and also allow for a much nicer user experience. If anyone is interested in discussing this further and/or working on this, please let me know. /Bergie -- -- Henri Bergius -- +358 40 525 1334 -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://www.iki.fi/Henri.Bergius -- This is The Midgard Project's mailing list. For more information, please visit the project's web site at http://www.midgard-project.org To unsubscribe the list, send an empty email message to address [EMAIL PROTECTED]
