[MKDoc-dev] Improving MKDoc Installation

[Sam Tregar]

On Thu, 23 Sep 2004, Chris Croome wrote:

> I see the Krang way of doing this as an interim way of making things
> easier prior to getting the native packages sorted out.

As a side note, people on the Krang project are also interested in
getting native package distribution working.  I'm now wondering if
there's some way to separate the Krang installation system out as a
separate project that could be used to install any Apache/mod_perl
app.  Then we could add native package generation support to that
system and kill n-birds with 1 stone.

> One thing I'm not sure about with Sam's suggestion is how to deal
> with native CPAN packages being installed or not, for example Petal
> is packages for debian already and there are a lot of the CPAN
> modules that are needed packaged for Fedora (eg XML:RSS) by 3rd
> parties (DAG, Freshrpms etc) and many people will be using these
> repos already...

I think it would be possible to add support for using native CPAN
packages in place of building and installing.  Actually, I think it
would be no harder than a few lines of code added to the
platform-support module.  In Krang each supported platform has a
module which inherits from Krang::Platform and can override methods to
implement platform-specific features.

> The tricky issue thougih is apache and mod_perl, currently apache 1.3
> is required and many distros, like Fedora, ship with apache 2... so
> a new apache and mod_perl does need to be complied from source.

Another problem is that Apache 1.3 is often compiled to load mod_perl
as a DSO which leads to cronic instability.

> It could be that it would be easier to target debian for native
> packages since I expect they will be using apache 1.3 for the
> forseeable future... 

Porting Bricolage to Debian was an amazingly difficult job.  Debian
has the strangest Apache install I've ever seen.  For better or worse
Apache is an extremely flexible piece of software and it's really
unbelievable how many different ways there are to compile and
configure it!

-sam