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Date: Thu, 3 Nov 2011 17:08:10 +0100
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 <CAJNb-9qXJLdE5wkEuJZkj_1tJWia64tqrWUSxQ8XkUW8Aw=VjA@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Binary Downloads
From: Benoit Chesneau <bchesneau@gmail.com>
To: dev@couchdb.apache.org
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On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 12:35 PM, Jan Lehnardt <jan@apache.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I think we should start considering providing binary downloads for our us=
ers.
>
> The whole topic is a bit of a mess (see below), so I'd propose to start s=
mall.
>
> 1. This first iteration are links from couchdb.apache.org that are clearl=
y
> =A0 marked as "unofficial 3rd party binary downloads" that are not hosted=
 on
> =A0 ASF infrastructure.
>
> 2. Start with popular platforms.
>
> 3. Use the build-couchdb* script to create a fully self-contained directo=
ry with
> =A0 CouchDB and all its dependencies in one place that can be rm -rf'd fo=
r
> =A0 uninstalling.
>
> * https://github.com/iriscouch/build-couchdb
>
>
> The above circumvents several things that I hope we can resolve later, bu=
t that
> I don't consider blocking us from getting the above started.
>
> A. Official ASF releases. Of course, ideally, we should provide official =
ASF
> =A0 binary releases, but I acknowledge that with a small community, we ma=
y have
> =A0 trouble getting votes and testing for all popular platforms together.
>
> =A0 The nice thing of the proposal above though is, that we can, at any t=
ime
> =A0 promote an unofficial build to an official one by voting on it and ch=
anging
> =A0 it's label on the downloads page.
>
> B. There's many target platforms our users work with and we can't possibl=
y try
> =A0 to service them all at once. We can grow this operation as we get vol=
unteers
> =A0 to help out with each platform.
>
> =A0 The nice thing here is that we can help a significant portion of user=
s with
> =A0 relatively little effort.
>
> C. Using existing package managers. There are many advantages to use offi=
cial
> =A0 package managers for system installation and they should in fact be t=
he
> =A0 preferred way to set up a system, but they tend to be a little bit be=
hind
> =A0 with current releases.
>
> =A0 I'd be super happy to also work with existing package managers to imp=
rove
> =A0 the situation there, but I consider this to be outside of the scope o=
f this
> =A0 discussion.
>
>
> What do you think?
>
> Cheers
> Jan
> --
>
>

Ah, quite interresting topic. Thanks to raise it!

I'm +1 on the idea to have "official binaries" but I really dislike
the idea to have to use build-couchdb for that. Or any system that use
rakes, ruby, python .... where we could just use erlang and unix
tools. It does the job but it's petty ugly (Jason, no offense,
build-couchdb does its job quite well).

I think to do the right job we could:

- adapt the build system to build proper elang release (using
reltools). We can wrap rebar for that since it's pretty efficient
these days and well supported (allows parralel builds, release buils
and clean updates) but this isn't really required, it can be perfectly
handled by autotools. (I think that using rebar would give us more
options though).  The advantage of using erlang release tools is that
we can cleanly manage the modules we need. You can manage templates,
so other distributors can adapt it to their system.

- Create a toolchain =E0 la mozilla that would allows later to introduce
later cross-complication and start to support other platforms. They
are petty good for that and I think we can borrow a couple of ideas.

I would be really interested to work on such things. Also maybe with a
proper toolchain we could setup a build-bot that create nightly
releases and such.

- benoit