[dev] Horde Installer

[Jon Parise]

On Sun, Jul 29, 2001 at 12:55:33PM -0500, Brent J. Nordquist wrote:

> How'd the presentations go?  Well-received, well-attended?

Good, yes, and yes

Both Chuck and I had a lot of folks seek us out after the
presentation(s) to pay compliments, ask questions, and make
suggestions.

Also (and I believe Chuck missed this part because he left
earlier on Friday), our Horde code is being viewed as "exemplary"
PHP code.  A lot of our paradigms are already PEAR standards, and
a lot of the more basic stuff we do (like offer the test.php
script) were regarded as somewhat brilliant.  

Back to the topic at hand ... <g>

> > So I attended Andrei and Frank's "PHP-GTK" presentation at the
> > O'Reilly Convention last week, and I have to say, it is one really
> > cool use of PHP.
> 
> For those of us who weren't there, could you mention a few of the things
> that you thought were cool; things that you see as advantages over just
> straight PHP as an installer?

Aside from the obvious benefits of a GUI installer, it would
allow the administrator to run the installation program as a
privileged user so that we wouldn't have to play games with
permissions.

Their web site is at http://gtk.php.net, for further reference.
 
> > Of course, this doesn't necessarily have to be _the_ Horde installer,
> > but it would definitely be neat to have _a_ GUI Horde installer.
> 
> I think that's the bottom line for me; even if the GUI installer was the
> one that was "recommended", most mature, getting most of the attention
> etc., as long as it's *possible* for someone to create a different kind of
> installer, I'd be OK with that.

Right.  We've talked about the different methods of embedding
"meta-data" in the configuration files so that the different
settings and values could be read and altered programmatically.

Once there's some kind of standard there, any number of
configuration tools could be used to maintain the files.
 
-- 
Jon Parise (jon@csh.rit.edu)  .  Rochester Inst. of Technology
http://www.csh.rit.edu/~jon/  :  Computer Science House Member