On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 12:35 PM, Jan Lehnardt <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi all, > > I think we should start considering providing binary downloads for our > users. > > The whole topic is a bit of a mess (see below), so I'd propose to start > small. > > 1. This first iteration are links from couchdb.apache.org that are clearly > marked as "unofficial 3rd party binary downloads" that are not hosted on > ASF infrastructure. > > 2. Start with popular platforms. > > 3. Use the build-couchdb* script to create a fully self-contained > directory with > CouchDB and all its dependencies in one place that can be rm -rf'd for > uninstalling. > > * https://github.com/iriscouch/build-couchdb > > > The above circumvents several things that I hope we can resolve later, but > that > I don't consider blocking us from getting the above started. > > A. Official ASF releases. Of course, ideally, we should provide official > ASF > binary releases, but I acknowledge that with a small community, we may > have > trouble getting votes and testing for all popular platforms together. > > The nice thing of the proposal above though is, that we can, at any time > promote an unofficial build to an official one by voting on it and > changing > it's label on the downloads page. > > B. There's many target platforms our users work with and we can't possibly > try > to service them all at once. We can grow this operation as we get > volunteers > to help out with each platform. > > The nice thing here is that we can help a significant portion of users > with > relatively little effort. > > C. Using existing package managers. There are many advantages to use > official > package managers for system installation and they should in fact be the > preferred way to set up a system, but they tend to be a little bit behind > with current releases. > > I'd be super happy to also work with existing package managers to improve > the situation there, but I consider this to be outside of the scope of > this > discussion. > > > What do you think? > > Cheers > Jan > -- > > Yes and no. I'm not a fan of rogue binary installs which don't leverage anything distributions have to offer. It's never all self-contained, e.g. you want to register the service for a startup procedure and off you go into specifics of a system and outside a single directory. If anything it should be specific to the target: on Ubuntu/Debian there should be a launchpad project which contains updated releases of CouchDB for let's say the current Ubuntu/Debian releases. On Redhat/CentOS/Fedora a yum-mirror would be appropriate, etc. pp.. I'm sure each platform has a project to piggyback. Generally though, I'm not sure what the objective is. E.g. is it to please people on hackernews (SCNR)? :-D But for realz: is it to ensure more up-to-date CouchDB (binary) releases on different platforms? Because that might be something to work on. As far as binary is concerned, most platforms have something already (Ubuntu, Debian, *BSD, ...). And some just don't do binary at all (I think Archlinux and Gentoo would be examples). And then I am not sure if providing a binary to their users makes sense. Also to consider: team up with current package maintainers in order to have more frequent releases etc.. Or at least give that a try, before the CouchDB project goes off to do their own thing. Till
