[Koha-devel] Officially supported OS versions

[Galen Charlton]

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 at esilibrary.com
direct: +1 770-709-5581
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