[ome-devel] Improving the OMERO installation docs for Homebrew

[Curtis Rueden]

Hi everyone,

Following up on some discussion in devteam, there are some changes I think
we should make to the docs to make installation of OMERO easier on OS X.

My use case is "install OMERO on OS X, as easily and quickly as possible."

More specifically, I need an installation for developer testing, so don't
need a production web server, automatically started server, or any of that.
But that's secondary...

Currently there are two relevant guides:

1) The Homebrew guide -
https://www.openmicroscopy.org/site/support/omero5.1/sysadmins/unix/server-install-homebrew.html

2) The Unix guide -
https://www.openmicroscopy.org/site/support/omero5.1/sysadmins/unix/server-installation.html

I figured the Homebrew approach would be the most painless on OS X, so I
went for that. But, at the top of the page, it says:

> Note that this demonstrates how to install OMERO.server from the
> source code via Homebrew, in addition to all its prerequisites. The
> default instructions for UNIX platforms in the OMERO.server
> installation guide are all you need to install the prerequisites with
> Homebrew and then install the server zip from the downloads page or
> build from source.

Since I wanted to install OMERO from the binary distribution, and not from
source, I then switched to the generic Unix guide.

The Homebrew guide mentions the fact that there is an ome tap, and that you
can install the dependencies only (without omero itself) using:

  brew install omero --only-dependencies

However, the Unix guide does not mention this; instead, it lists all the
dependencies individually (in boxes along with several other package
managers).

It would have saved me time to use the invocation above, rather than
manually installing everything by hand, had it occurred to me. In
particular, the ice dependency _must_ be installed with the "--with-python"
option, or else OMERO cannot talk to Ice via Python [1].

Given the large number of dependencies, my suggestion would be to
streamline the information: purge the list of Homebrew deps, in favor of
putting the ome tap front and center. In general, having installed/upgraded
OMERO a few times recently on both Linux and OS X, my impression is that
there are too many shell commands required, making it easy to encounter
problems. The Homebrew tap is a great way to cut down on the amount of user
interaction required to get things up and running.

Regards,
Curtis

P.S. Another great way to go would be Docker. It's awesome that boot2docker
launches in 4 seconds on OS X.

[1] In this scenario, the omero CLI reports that the "installation is
incomplete" because omero.cli cannot be imported, but does not identify the
root cause: a failing "import Ice" command.
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