[Koha-devel] Officially supported OS versions

[Tomas Cohen Arazi]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 11:57 AM, Ian Walls <koha.sekjal at 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+