Hi, On 08/17/2012 10:57 AM, Ian Walls wrote:
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.
As a data point for your descriptive question, Equinox uses Debian stable for Koha instance we host.
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.
I suggest expressing it more generically -- say "Koha is supported on Debian stable" (natch) or "Koha is supported on Debian stable and oldstable" (which would be my preference.
Any current Ubuntu LTS may also be appropriate, though the current situation has me unable to install a dependency on 10.04.
I suggest targeting the current and the immediate previous LTS, with the LTS third-back being optional.
In the past, I know that RedHat installs have been particularly vicious, and may not even be possible at this time.
I think RHEL/Fedora/CentOS support is basically dependent on enough people stepping up who are willing to maintain it.
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.
I think that's a little too strict -- since most of Koha's dependencies are pure Perl modules, the bar for getting a module packaged for newstable into stable-backports is relatively low. In other words, I suggest we target Debian stable + stable-backports (and oldstable + oldstable-backports). Regards, Galen -- Galen Charlton Director of Support and Implementation Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts email: gmc@esilibrary.com direct: +1 770-709-5581 cell: +1 404-984-4366 skype: gmcharlt web: http://www.esilibrary.com/ Supporting Koha and Evergreen: http://koha-community.org & http://evergreen-ils.org