[imp] Tarball with all sources in it

[Rich Lafferty]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2001 at 01:49:23PM -0700, Travis Zadikem (travis@thezadikems.net) wrote:
> A few friends of mine have been looking at IMP/HORDE
> for a while, but keep getting shyed away because of
> all the downloads that they have toget first (i.e.,
> PHP4, APACHE, openssl (if they want ssl), imp, horde,
> etc).  Why doesn't someone create a tarball with all
> the sources in it.

I've thought of stuff like this before; in particular, I wanted to
either put together precompiled packages for particular operating
systems, or a metapackage with its own autoconf that'd build
everything you need.

Releasing a big package like that means releasing every time one of
the depended-upon packages releases a bugfix or security
release. It's a huge administrative hassle, and I couldn't quite
convince myself that it was that hard to go to half a dozen FTP
servers to grab software. And then there's the problem of not wanting
to dictate precisely what PHP version or database or addressbook
features a user wants. Even /then/, I suspect many people will already
have Apache installed, quite a few will already have PHP installed,
fewer still but a significant number will already have a DBMS
installed, and the marginal utility of a comprehensive, single 15-20MB
download goes down fast.

There's really no way to escape the fact that IMP requires system
administration skills to install. Luckily, all of the important core
dependencies are mature software, are commonly already around, and are
mirrored all over the place. 

As for a big tarball with no automation, you still have the updates
problem -- but even then, I suspect your friends' objection is that
they have to /install/ those things, not that they have to download
them (which is a couple of minutes of surfing and typing, at best!),
so the advantages of putting them in one package really doesn't
justify the effort of maintaining it.

(Of course, there's nothing stopping an IMP user with some spare time
from doing up unofficial distributions in that manner, if they thought
that the advantages justified the work.)

  -Rich

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Rich Lafferty --------------+-----------------------------------------------
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