Re: State of Perl-based database setup utilities for LedgerSMB 1.3

[Adam Thompson <..hidden..>]

Make (1) is already effectively a mandatory dependency due to all the perl modules that must currently be installed, and possibly barring OpenBSD with the recent work, I don't know of a single distro that packages all the deps.
(and, of course, make is required anyway for OpenBSD ports)
-Adam


Chris Travers <..hidden..> wrote:

>Currently there are two approaches to installing databases in Perl.
>The first (initiate.pl) has officially been moved to add-ons and is a
>web-based interface for this process.  I have not personally used it,
>although I have recently committed a lot of patches against it.
>
>The second approach is the use of makefile targets installdb and
>installdb_interactive.  These are not well documented at the moment
>and the interface of installdb is very sub-optimal.  If you set
>appropriate environment variables as documented in README.tests file
>and rune make installdb, it will install a database for you and run
>sanity checks on that database.  If you run make
>installdb_interactive, it will ask you for all relevant information
>and set the environment variables locally with the script.  This comes
>build into the default installation of LedgerSMB 1.3 at the moment,
>but it relies on two important dependencies: make and a perl test
>harness.
>
>The structure of the scripts is such that we could do without make
>quite easily, but if we want to test the database post-install
>(ensuring no unexpectedly overloaded functions, etc), we cannot
>reasonably get rid of the test framework without maintaining
>additional levels of abstraction to the database tests.
>
>The user interface problems here can be reasonably solved through use
>of wrapper scripts which take command line arguments, set up
>appropriate environment variables, and run the relevant scripts or
>commands.  But this leads to the question:  do we want to depend on
>perl test infrastructure and/or make utilities to be on systems we are
>building databases from?  And given the amount of code in the
>database, do we want to treat creating a new company database as a
>build process or an administrative task for dependency and/or UI
>reasons?
>
>Best Wishes,
>Chris Travers
>
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