[dev] Installation Thoughts

[Mathieu Parent]

Hi Michael,

2013/10/17 Michael M Slusarz <slusarz at horde.org>:
> Going through our installation process on a Debian VM (specifically using a
> distro that has given us issues), and here's what I think so far.  (This is
> simply on the PEAR install process - this is independent of
> configuring/running any of our code.)

(with my Debian packager hat).

Shouldn't the recommended way to install Horde on distributions be
using the native package manager?

For Debian jessie, this can be done with:
apt-get install php-horde-webmail # for example

Complete instructions (including Debian 7) are at: https://wiki.debian.org/Horde

This provide better upgrade mechanism as well as proper dependency
tracking (PEAR lacks in those both areas, and Composer is not really
better).

> * Two immediate fatal flaws I see.  beta/alpha packages are NEVER installed
> and packages from foreign channels are NEVER installed.  At least with the
> default PEAR settings on Debian 7.

This seems a reasonable default.

[...]
>
> This can be fixed by doing a force install (-f).  But I have to admit that,
> as someone familiar with PEAR/PECL, this is not apparent to me at all.  For
> someone -- i.e. pretty much every one else -- they are going to think that
> horde_lz4 is properly installed on their system.

Yes. PEAR is broken in handling PECL packages.

> Takeaways from all this:
>   1. Not saying we should remove -B, but we have to workaround this.

Why don't you simply remove -B?

[...]

Regards

-- 
Mathieu