Alex, This is a great list of questions! Its just the kind of real enduser feedback we need. I invite you to keep this dialog moving with us.
On May 12, 2011, at 8:51 AM, Lemann, Alexander Bernard wrote: > At the risk of being to anecdotal and ranting, but with the goal of bringing > a dspace newbie perspective to the discussion about newbies.... > > The person running the simple installer is signing up to be the administrator > for a web application. They're not installing up Acrobat Reader on their own > machine. They should be able to install ~5 prereqs (svn, tomcat, mvn, cron, > java). I'm certainly biased because I'm a webdev not a librarian. > > I haven't had trouble with the initial installation documentation (beyond mvn > version issues in OSX). After installing DSpace, *configuration* is simple > too---I just edit files in C:\dspace. As a second data point, we had a 4th > year CS student worker install DSpace who had no web development experience > before. He found it easy. I think we want to possibly either reduce this list of dependencies or ease this first step to make a deployment easier to get into place. > > I have had trouble with the *customization* documentation. How do I rebuild > & reinstall just my changes so things won't take ~3 minutes? Why is DSpace > versioning my stuff (.bak, .new) files, and relatedly why won't things > install when I tell ant to install them? This is the borderline between the admin just running DSpace and the developer customizing it. And I think want we are seeking is a cleaner delineation between the two cases so that the choice to deploy DSpace isn't dependent on running an unnecessary build process with developer tools like maven/ant. > How do I debug the code with/without an IDE (can I step through code)? How to > customize permissions (DS-880). How should I use version control to manage my > configurations/customizations easily? How should I manage > devel->staging->production deployment (& across platforms)? How can I handle > multiple devel->staging->deployments on a single devel machine. Even if > these were simply pointers to java/mvn/ant/tomcat/war/git/svn/whatever best > practices, that would be helpful. This is the other side of that delineation, how do we make it so that doing customization of DSpace from various sources can work against that prepackages binary distribution. > Also, documentation doesn't count if it's in a scribd presentation, a wiki > page, or at all hard to find. I think better documentation all around would > help more than automated installation. > > This is obviously just one opinion, but rather than guessing what users are > struggling with, how about polling dspace-general or dspace-tech? Of course > then you may just be left with N annoying rants rather than just this one.... TBH, I found your post neither annoying nor a rant ;-) thanks, Mark -- Mark R. Diggory @mire - www.atmire.com 2888 Loker Avenue East - Suite 305 - Carlsbad - CA - 92010 Technologielaan 9 - 3001 Heverlee - Belgium ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Achieve unprecedented app performance and reliability What every C/C++ and Fortran developer should know. Learn how Intel has extended the reach of its next-generation tools to help boost performance applications - inlcuding clusters. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devmay _______________________________________________ Dspace-devel mailing list Dspace-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-devel
