[ome-devel] OME installation difficulties

[Ilya Goldberg]

On Aug 15, 2005, at 4:54 AM, Josh Moore wrote:
>
> Disagree. Need to differentiate between users and the sysadmins.
> Sysadmins, especially for clusters, at least over here, are fairly
> serious debian users.

Please understand, I am not even suggesting that we should not support 
Debian.
The point is that we need to identify precisely which OSes we support 
and differentiate which OSes we support officially and which we don't.  
By OSes, I mean the exact distribution and version, not "We support 
Linux".  Not "Postgres 7.2 or later", but a version we actually tested 
and know works.  By support, I mean that given a clean distribution of 
the type we specify, installation should proceed without error if the 
installation notes are followed to the letter.

We should seriously consider hosting ISOs based on the distributions we 
support, possibly modified to include all of our dependencies in the 
"default install".

If we isolated particular distributions we support, call them 
"Official", and make sure that our installation notes work on a clean 
system, we would potentially eliminate a lot of installation issues.  
 From the people I talked to, even unix nubes are perfectly willing to 
follow even a moderately complex set of command-line instructions if 
what they get at the end is a functioning system.  We can't rely on 
"download this package and install it."  We need to specify the exact 
version number and also host the required package, and in the 
installation instructions specify that people should download and 
install the mirrored package that we know works, and not a possibly 
updated version that we've never tested.  Over and over again, we have 
been screwed when a "new version" of something causes our software or 
installation to break.  Things don't "just work".  We need a belt and 
suspenders to make sure that we don't get screwed over by new 
incompatible versions.  It is far more useful to an end-user to have a 
functioning system that it is to have "the latest version" of 
everything.

We need to be able to cover our asses better.  When people say "well, 
we can't install it", we must be able to say "well, you did not use a 
supported platform".  This is not to say we won't help them or fix 
things to make our software more robust, but if we are extremely 
specific, then support for these new OSes will not be considered a 
limitation of our software, but "additional features" that we can add 
(or not).  Every commercial software in existence specifies precisely 
what platforms they support.  We must do the same.

-I