[dev] Horde Installer

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

Jon Parise wrote:
>
> On Sun, Jul 29, 2001 at 06:19:41PM -0400, Rich Lafferty wrote:
>
> > What scope do you picture an "installer" covering?
>
> I figured it would live at the Horde level.  It would be able to
> manage Horde's configuration settings as well as detect installed
> applications, which could also be configured.

I think we need to tackle the problem of Horde application installation
on a more general level.

The ideal installation methods we could use are:

- Just copy *.dist files over, and they have sensible defaults

- Have a command-line script to do some autoconf-style magic

- Have an interactive command-line script

- Have a web-based setup (ala IMP-2.0)

- Have X11, Win32, MacOS, whatever based graphical installers

In other words, we want to have a generic way of accessing configuration
data for any given Horde application.  Each of the methods has its
drawbacks (.dist files require knowledge of Horde, X11 introduces
complex dependencies, autoconf is too C-biased, etc), but if we
generalise configuration, there's no reason why all of them couldn't
exist.

I was thinking that we could have a 'master config file' that could
output sensible .dist defaults, or expose options to the more
interactive scripts.  There's loads and loads of ways this could be done
(XML based, or just embed special tokens into a dist file).  Do people
think this is the way to go?

The other question is: this version of Horde, or save the work for the
next version, and shift towards a stable release rapidly?  We can keep
adding features forever :)

Anil