[Koha-devel] Officially supported OS versions

[MJ Ray]

Ian asked:
> 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 think the role of koha-community should be to describe what Koha
runs on.  This has a consequence: I'd like developers and RMs to be
pretty conservative about adding new dependencies or adopting features
only found in new versions of dependencies, because each time that
happens, we might kill support for some version of something.

Which brings me to this...

> 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.

In general, I don't think we should be supporting any particular
distributions as a community.  However, there are two small(?)
exceptions to that:

1. the community distributions like debian and fedora are in a special
place.  We're all volunteers and we can develop packages on
koha-community as an experimental place, before they get handed over
into the distributions.  I'd be very happy to see packages of koha and
dependencies for debian and fedora;

2. some of the support providers may want to offer packages
privately-controlled distributions for commercial reasons - if they
want to do that linked from koha-community, that's fine, but if they
stop resourcing it, I don't think the community should expect
volunteers to work for the distribution businesses for free.

So, in short: maybe offer packages for debian and fedora and any
other similar ones, else just describe what works and help
any third-party offerings.

Hope that explains,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/