On Sat, Jul 06, 2002 at 01:51:42PM -0700, Tonnesen Steve wrote:
I agree that there are some things that we should be relying on modules for (MARC support, Z39.50), but I don't think that we should be adding a module dependency for the 4 lines of code required to check the validity of an ISBN.
I don't want to be argumentative, but those four lines of code have been in Koha for 8 months (CVS start of marcimport.pl), and the bug was just now caught. How many other latent bugs are throughout Koha because we are re-inventing the wheel, that wouldn't be there by using a pre-debugged CPAN module? It's impossible to know. However, I expect that solving the fundamental CPAN dependency problem for one module will solve it for all modules. If we can properly detect and install one CPAN module to solve a dependency, we can do that with a list of modules too.
It would also be nice to have a short tutorial on diagnosing module problems (If you see something like _this_ in your apache error logs, that means you are missing _this_. Explain what the @INC paths are that should also be down in the apache error logs, and how to use CPAN to install the missing modules). If this could be automated, that'd be great.
Yes, that's a great idea.
At this point in Koha's development, installation problems are losing us a lot of potential users, in my opinion. It's getting better, of course, but we still need to pay attention to it.
Rhetorical question: Which is worse, a tough installation that provides a working system afterwards, or an easy installation that provides a buggy system afterwards? No quick simple answer, but you can guess which way I'm leaning. Just my food for thought. Thanks for the dialog. - Alan ---- Alan Millar --==> am12@bolis.com <==--