[OPEN-ILS-DEV] ***SPAM*** Re: Evergreen installation problems--Issues with erlang & Ubuntu

[John Craig]

Hi Folks, I discovered, last night, that the current Ubuntu deb amd64 package file for erlang-base (and possibly also erlang-nox), are corrupt (aptitude reports that there is a "Hash sum mismatch" error on erlang-base and does not even attempt to install it). I'm not entirely sure about erlang-nox (as erlang-base is required by it). In fact, I was not even successful in getting the erlang-src package to load via aptitude (it attempts to load erlang-base first, so the whole mess fails). The erlang packages are required by ejabberd (so they get loaded implicitly). I also ran into problems with some of the Perl modules (notably some of the DateTime-related modules; separate email coming if I figure anything out about them). So, this problem with erlang-base may account for recent problems reported with trying to get Evergreen to install properly on Ubuntu. This problem prevents the OpenSRF prerequisites from installing (Step 3 in the OpenSRF install instructions), but it would scroll by so fast, you'd be unlikely to even see it (unless you had redirected stderr to a file--which, of course, the install instructions do not include directions for). If you rerun the prerequisites installer you can more easily see the problem happening, because there's less messages flying by--but that's an unlikely course of action to take, if you're just following the written instructions. The messages from apt-get/aptitude do not stand out either. They're prefaced by "E: " (not noticeable among all the other info lines), so your best hope for spotting them may be to redirect stderr to a file and review it: make -f src/extras/Makefile.install distribution 2> prereq-errors.log more prereq-errors.log (The word distribution is replaced by the distro code name just as per the normal instructions. Lot's of people prefer less to more--but it does require you to know how to get out of it, and more is simpler from that point of view.) Unfortunately, if you have problems with any of the Perl modules, this is not terribly satisfactory either: you do not get very useful messages from cpan so it's difficult to tell if Perl modules failed to get loaded or they complained at you, but loaded anyway. I don't have the scripting expertise to do it within a reasonably short time, but it would be great to have the pre-req install step do a check at the end to verify that all the pieces it tries to upgrade and install are actually there and gave a nice, concise summary of what worked and what didn't--that might require calling make from a script (I'm not familiar with what can and cannot practically be included in a makefile). In the mean time, although I have not completed and tested the OpenSRF install on this particular server, I did find the Debian package lists to have valid packages for erlang and you can get them and load them "by hand" this way (naturally, you can use a different mirror rather than mirrors.kernel.org, if you like): wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/pool/main/e/erlang-base_12.b.3-dfsg-4_amd64.deb dpkg -i erlang-base_12.b.3-dfsg-4_amd64.deb wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/pool/main/e/erlang-nox_12.b.3-dfsg-4_amd64.deb dpkg -i erlang-nox_12.b.3-dfsg-4_amd64.deb As noted, I cannot yet say that this worked fully, but if someone is fighting with an Ubuntu install, this may be useful to getting beyond this particular issue. (I also had some problems with Perl modules, but I haven't tracked those down to their absolute root cause--and they would not have been different between Debian and Ubuntu in any case so I'm not sure what the deal is there.) John