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Date: Sun, 6 Nov 2011 08:07:02 -0800
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 <CAAJr9qbaPEULAGG3zEyPtzzOXfb-LFRx1QHS35Jsd3nZ7=wE6w@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Binary Downloads
From: kowsik <kowsik@gmail.com>
To: dev@couchdb.apache.org
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 7:41 AM, Noah Slater <nslater@tumbolia.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 2:13 PM, Riyad Kalla <rkalla@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Many of you are too close to the problem to see it, but the 10-second
>> impression when you step into the Couch world (as compared to Mongo, Redis,
>> Orient, Raven or even Cassandra) is "... where do I download and run this
>> thing?"
>>
>
> http://redis.io/download
>
> Great download page, I love it. It looks about as complex as CouchDB,
> knowing what I know about CouchDB. For our new users, this wouldn't be the
> case. We should work on that. If our download page was more like this, that
> would be awesome. That's more of a design issue though. Note that this page
> works because it's well documented and clear. That's the only difference.

Big difference here: Redis is a self contained package with no other
external dependencies and hence the:

$ wget http://redis.googlecode.com/files/redis-2.4.2.tar.gz
$ tar xzf redis-2.4.2.tar.gz
$ cd redis-2.4.2
$ make

No, 'configure', no installing external dependencies, just make. And
this is why it works for them.

Contrast this with CouchDB which has huge dependencies external to
itself (the right version of erlang, compiling it with just the right
options, openssl, spidermonkey, etc, etc). Personally, I love the
simplicity of CouchDBX. One click and boom you are up and running.
This is philosophical, but ultimately no matter what software you are
building, if the time to value is going to take a bunch of hoops to
get through, nobody's going to have the patience.

Personally, I rely on build-couchdb. @_jhs and others have added
knowledge into this about OS detection and how best to get couchdb
setup and compiled and started on specific distro's. It implicitly
encodes this knowledge of 'on this OS you have to compile erlang with
these flags' kind of things.

I would love a binary "installer" that asks you a few questions and
you are up and running.But this, I know, is a fair bit of work, but
it's work that we are passing on to the end user. Second up would be
build-couchdb equivalent which does a lot of this from source, but can
take up to an hour to get going depending on the horsepower of your
machine.

2 cents,

K.
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