On Thu, 2009-11-12 at 12:45 +1100, Harbottle, Joel R wrote: > Hi Jason, > > Would this be able to put on the list of things for development > sometime? I think this could help many libraries.
Hi Joel: This (making the Evergreen core server components run on Windows) is not on my personal development priority list. But if someone were to come along and ensure that all of the core Evergreen code compiles cleanly, and that all of the dependencies and Perl modules integrated and ran correctly, wrote install instructions, and offered to maintain the Windows bits & provide support on the mailing lists / IRC, then we wouldn't turn that person down. It's just a lot of work that I (and I suspect the rest of the development team and contributors) don't want to take on personally as there's very little concrete benefit from such an effort. I'd much rather spend what little time I have to contribute on squashing bugs, writing documentation, and adding more features to the existing platforms on which it runs. I would love to see people step up and adopt other Linux and BSD distros like RHEL/CentOS, Fedora, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. There are only five steps required: Step 1 is to adapt the Makefile.install for OpenSRF to your distro. Step 2 is to adapt the autotools to your distro (if necessary). Step 3 is to repeat steps 1 and 2 for Evergreen Makefile.install and autotools. Step 4 is to document the complete installation process on your distro, including required changes to system configuration like SELinux policies. Step 5 is to submit all of the diffs from steps 1 through 4 as a patch, and get some other people to test them out on both the new distro, and ensure that the patches don't break support for the existing supported platforms. Ideally, step 6 would be to create a virtual image so that other people can poke around and figure out the pieces that you forgot to document because you know the platform so well :) Also, ideally around step 6 is the "help support other people trying to follow in your footsteps". Even without providing full support for other distros, we've had some great contributions from people who have been working towards running on other distributions - Wiktor at McMaster University comes to mind, as he was the first to run into & figure out the problem with newer versions of ejabberd, and Bill Erickson was able to quickly commit a patch that resolved the problem not just on Fedora, but also for Ubuntu 9.04 and higher.
