[Koha-devel] Ubuntu support

[Mark Tompsett]

Greetings,

I'd like to point out that development generally occurs in Debian-based 
environment, so descendent-OS' should work, but are not as well supported. 
The organization I am with has more people familiar with Ubuntu than Debian, 
so I chose Ubuntu for the purposes of having someone else being able to take 
over. I hope the following ramble is useful somehow.

Tomas wrote:
> $ dselect --set-selections install_misc/ubuntu.packages
> $ dselect install

I think you meant to have a '<' in there. :)

Actually, as I was not familiar with and am still not familiar with the 
packages, I did not include them in my reworking of the instructions on the 
wiki:
    http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Koha_on_Ubuntu
There are still some things I'd like to update on it, but haven't gotten 
around to it yet. Also, I suppose I just prefer to keep Ubuntu things Ubuntu 
and Debian things Debian. That's just my personal preference.

You have correctly pointed out that the ubuntu.packages and other non-debian 
files are out of date, need renaming, or are sometimes confusing. This is 
why I worked on updating the wiki page, as I didn't have a development 
system at the time.

There is a perl script, koha_perl_deps.pl -m, which lists missing things, 
and it is possible to transform Blah::blah into an 'aptitude search':
$ aptitude search blah-blah-perl
which might be business-isbn-perl, for example.

There was 1 OPTIONAL dependency that my development system had to borrow 
from an external, non-default repo while setting up my development system 
under Ubuntu 12.04. This would mean that installing from packages are 
probably okay and generally recommended (see Chris Cormack's email), though 
it is not my personal preference under Ubuntu. However, Chris' email 
suggests there are packages for Ubuntu. I think I may go looking.

At this time, as 3.6.X and 3.8.X are the two active versions, even though 
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is supported until next year, it doesn't make sense to try 
to support it. Both 10.04 LTS and 12.04 LTS work with both active versions 
of Koha, though 12.04 plays nicer in terms of most dependencies are in the 
default repositories, particularly for 3.6.X. Though, it doesn't make sense 
to install 3.6.X now, given that 3.10 will come out in a few months.

And at least one of those bug reports you reference is mine. :)

GPML,
Mark Tompsett