Folks: Apparently there is a problem with our mail server, because these letters that I sent last night were apparently never posted to the list.
If anyone else has had trouble with tahoe-dev mailing list behavior please let me know. Also: these letters I sent last night included a plea for help. :-) It is not too late! Join us on IRC. Regards, Zooko Forwarded conversation Subject: wiki gardening needed Re: [tahoe-dev] darcs patch: modified quickstart.html to note dependency on python-... ------------------------ From: Zooko O'Whielacronx <[email protected]> Date: Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 1:57 AM To: Tahoe-LAFS development <[email protected]> Folks: My intended design for the build scripts and install docs is not really written down anywhere, so people like Josh and David-Sarah don't realize that there are multiple ways to fix a bug like this one and that adding this information to quickstart.html is not the way I had preferred. So, I decided to write down these details on the wiki so that people would be able to find it, and when I looked at the wiki I found that there are several different pages describing build/install/etc. which give inconsistent stories: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/AdvancedInstall http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/WindowsBuild http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/DownloadDebianPackages http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Tutorial http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/UbuntuPackaging http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Packaging I'm going to try to do a bit of organizing and tidying these up right now, but I'm about to crash and sleep for awhile, so if someone else wants to take on the task of editing these wiki pages that would be great! The sooner the better, since we're going to announce Tahoe-LAFS v1.8.0-final tomorrow (2010-09-18) and our install docs on our wiki will hopefully get a lot more readers. :-) Regards, Zooko P.S. My strongest desire with regard to Josh's bug--that the build failed when he ran "python setup.py build" on his system--is that we get a deterministic, reproducible example of this bug hooked up to our buildbot. This could be done with a tool like chroot or a tool like pbuilder (which I believe is built on top of chroot) to make it so that the "python setup.py build" command will fail (due to the lack of python.h) even on a system which has the python-dev .deb package installed, because the python-dev .deb package will not be installed in the chroot. Then we would have a red test on our buildbot which could be made green only by fixing this bug in the way that I want quickstart.html to fix it--i.e. the way that works even if the user does not install the python-dev debian package. ---------- From: Zooko O'Whielacronx <[email protected]> Date: Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 2:24 AM To: Tahoe-LAFS development <[email protected]> Okay I wrote up an overview of my intended design of the Tahoe-LAFS setup process on the wiki: Below is the overview that I just added to that wiki page. Regards, Zooko quickstart.html The setup method that we offer to people when we don't know what platform they are setting up on or what level of expertise they have is "the quickstart.html method". This method starts by giving them a link to http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/trunk/docs/quickstart.html . * The quickstart.html is intended to be as platform-independent as possible--the only mention of a specific platform is that the dependency on "pywin32" can't be satisfied automatically (#142). * The quickstart.html should not instruct the user to install any dependency if the build system could instead satisfy that dependency automatically (currently, as of 2010-09-18, the only dependencies that can't be satisfied automatically are python, and pywin32 which is needed only on Windows). * The quickstart.html is intended to be as simple as possible. Options (you can do it this way or that way as you prefer) or branches (if you are in this situation do this, else do that) are strongly discouraged from being written into quickstart.html. If at all possible, please move those to AdvancedInstall. binary .egg's of dependency native-code packages For quickstart.html to work on your platform there must exist a binary .egg for your platform of every dependency which has a native-code extension module. Currently those are: pycryptopp, zfec, pywin32, and PyCrypto?. If there is not a binary .egg available of one of those packages for a given platform then this is a bug which prevents quickstart.html from working on that platform. (Note: if you already had that Python package installed on your system then you would be able to setup Tahoe-LAFS even if there is not a binary egg of that Python package available, e.g. if you manually installed the package already or if you installed the package already using an operating system packaging tool like apt-get. Nonetheless, since we can't rely on the user having done that and since quickstart.html cannot instruct the user to do that (see the section about quickstart.html above), then the absence of a binary .egg of a dependency for a platform is a bug preventing quickstart.html from working on that platform.) AdvancedInstall An alternative method to quickstart.html, is AdvancedInstall. This method would be appropriate for people who prefer for the setup to be done differently than the way quickstart.html works. It is also the fallback for people who have tried quickstart.html and it didn't work (although the fact that quickstart.html didn't work should also be treated as a build process bug even if falling back to AdvancedInstall allows the user to proceed). pre-built Debian packages See [DownloadDebianPackages]. as shipped by Ubuntu Tahoe-LAFS comes with Ubuntu. See http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/tahoe-lafs . _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list [email protected] http://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev
