On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 11:57 AM, Ian Walls <koha.sekjal@gmail.com> wrote:
Koha Developers,
As I try to get back in the swing of things after a long absence, I'm finding a lot of changes to Koha's dependencies to be particularly frustrating, as I need to add new package repositories or even upgrade my OS.
This leads me to the question: What OS versions does Koha run on? This is both a descriptive question (what's true now) as well as a prescriptive one (what systems SHOULD Koha run on).
I should think that Debian 6+ is a given. Any current Ubuntu LTS may also be appropriate, though the current situation has me unable to install a dependency on 10.04. In the past, I know that RedHat installs have been particularly vicious, and may not even be possible at this time.
Having a list of supported OS versions would simplify the lives of the QA team, because we would only need to test those systems that we've agreed to support. If someone can get Koha working on another OS, more power to them, but I think it's reasonable for people with moderate technical skills to be able to get Koha up and running on recommended systems without too many steps.
One implication of this would be that patches introducing dependencies not easily available on a supported system would be rejected or deferred until such time as they were easily available. So, for example, if a patch introduced a dependency that's packaged for Debian Wheezy, but not for Squeeze, it would not be added to Koha until Wheezy was released.
Thoughts, ideas, concerns, questions?
+1 for supporting both Debian releases (stable and oldstable) and +1 for 'officially' supporting the last two LTS Ubuntu releases. When I say supporting the last two LTS releases I mean that we should develop with those in mind (creating the missing packages, etc). If a more recent (non-LTS) version has a package the LTS doesnt, we need to provide that package and not rely on people using the non-LTS... I belive this will make everything smoother to maintain, and we also have a very responsive community to assist those that have specific needs (e.g. their infrastructure uses X distro/version). As I was said several times: supporting every distro out-of-the-box would be great. If a distro becomes popular in our user base then we will find the way to suppport it (sponsors, interested companies, etc). Regards To+