[Koha-devel] Which is the best Linux flavour to work with Koha ?

[Marc Chantreux]

On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 09:09:22PM +0800, Partha Mukhopadhyay wrote:
> I'm bit late in response and don't know what is the view of other Koha users.
> I can share my personal experience with you. I think community version of Redhat is now CentOS, not Fedora.

Actually: 

- Fedora is the communauty devedge, every new ideas comes in there
- Redhat uses ferdora snapshots, stabilize them and certify commercial
  software/hardware to run on it. Then they provide updates for money.
- Centos aims to be a free RHEL clone.

> > I need some suggestions. Which is the best Linux flavour to work on,
> > especially with Koha and why ?  Can any one please clarify ?

there is no "best linux flavour to work on". There are distributions
that fits your needs. Our need is to install and maintain a koha system
in production (with all the perl modules required). 

there is 2 approaches to maintain perl modules:
- the cpan way gives access to all the cpan modules, newer ones! It's
  very good for developpers but unconfortable for administrators. 
- the system package management: if you can use it, the perl modules of
  koha are managed as all the other parts of the system: administrators
  loves it! The counterpart is that you can install only the packaged
  perl modules. If some are missing, you have to build packages for
  yourself.

So when you install koha the biggest question is "how the distributor
carre about perl? how easy it will be to install and maintain perl
modules for koha from the system package management?".

My own experience: 

OK:
- Debian (and probably every maintained debian derived as ubuntu)
  comes with tons of packaged debian modules, very active communauty
  and tools to build your own packages and repo ( dh-make-perl,
  cpan2deb, dpkg-scanpackages ). 
- MacOs  (using macports and cpan2port) 
  if you already have mac servers, this could be the solution. Use
  linux/*BSD if not.

Nightmares ( unreliable ? ) : 
- RHLE, Centos (and probably every rpm-based)
 comes with a 5.8.8 interpretor,  a very thin amount of packages, no
 easy and maintained tool to create you own ones (perhaps i missed
 something here: please help!), devel packages too old to build XS parts
 of perl modules.

Mandiva exception ?: 

I didn't test it but you ought to know that mandiva is very active in
the perl world. the 5.10 pumpkin was mandiva employee and Jerome Quelin,
another Mandiva employee, is very active and maintains a lot of packages
up to date (including rakudo in the cooker). Jerome told me that he'll
maintain the packages for koha dependencies if he knows that someone
needs it. So Mandiva could become a good choice for koha.

In general: 

I used a lot of linux distributions and it seems to me that the debian
package system is much more confortable and reliable than the rpm based
ones. + it seems that Ubuntu (debian derivative) is now leader of the
linux distrbution. So if you have no preferences, my advice is to remove
every rpm based from the candidate list. 

regards

-- 
Marc Chantreux
BibLibre, expert en logiciels libres pour l'info-doc
http://biblibre.com