[tahoe-dev] Fwd: wiki gardening needed Re: darcs patch: modified quickstart.html to note dependency on python-...

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

Folks:

Apparently there is a problem with our mail server, because these
letters that I sent last night were apparently never posted to the
list.

If anyone else has had trouble with tahoe-dev mailing list behavior
please let me know.

Also: these letters I sent last night included a plea for help. :-) It
is not too late! Join us on IRC.

Regards,

Zooko

Forwarded conversation
Subject: wiki gardening needed Re: [tahoe-dev] darcs patch: modified
quickstart.html to note dependency on python-...
------------------------

From: Zooko O'Whielacronx <zooko at zooko.com>
Date: Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 1:57 AM
To: Tahoe-LAFS development <tahoe-dev at tahoe-lafs.org>


Folks:

My intended design for the build scripts and install docs is not
really written down anywhere, so people like Josh and David-Sarah
don't realize that there are multiple ways to fix a bug like this one
and that adding this information to quickstart.html is not the way I
had preferred.

So, I decided to write down these details on the wiki so that people
would be able to find it, and when I looked at the wiki I found that
there are several different pages describing build/install/etc. which
give inconsistent stories:

http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/AdvancedInstall
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/WindowsBuild
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/DownloadDebianPackages
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Tutorial
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/UbuntuPackaging
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Packaging

I'm going to try to do a bit of organizing and tidying these up right
now, but I'm about to crash and sleep for awhile, so if someone else
wants to take on the task of editing these wiki pages that would be
great! The sooner the better, since we're going to announce Tahoe-LAFS
v1.8.0-final tomorrow (2010-09-18) and our install docs on our wiki
will hopefully get a lot more readers. :-)

Regards,

Zooko

P.S. My strongest desire with regard to Josh's bug--that the build
failed when he ran "python setup.py build" on his system--is that we
get a deterministic, reproducible example of this bug hooked up to our
buildbot. This could be done with a tool like chroot or a tool like
pbuilder (which I believe is built on top of chroot) to make it so
that the "python setup.py build" command will fail (due to the lack of
python.h) even on a system which has the python-dev .deb package
installed, because the python-dev .deb package will not be installed
in the chroot. Then we would have a red test on our buildbot which
could be made green only by fixing this bug in the way that I want
quickstart.html to fix it--i.e. the way that works even if the user
does not install the python-dev debian package.

----------
From: Zooko O'Whielacronx <zooko at zooko.com>
Date: Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 2:24 AM
To: Tahoe-LAFS development <tahoe-dev at tahoe-lafs.org>


Okay I wrote up an overview of my intended design of the Tahoe-LAFS
setup process on the wiki:
Below is the overview that I just added to that wiki page.

Regards,

Zooko

quickstart.html

The setup method that we offer to people when we don't know what
platform they are setting up on or what level of expertise they have
is "the quickstart.html method". This method starts by giving them a
link to http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/trunk/docs/quickstart.html
.

  * The quickstart.html is intended to be as platform-independent as
possible--the only mention of a specific platform is that the
dependency on "pywin32" can't be satisfied automatically (#142).
  * The quickstart.html should not instruct the user to install any
dependency if the build system could instead satisfy that dependency
automatically (currently, as of 2010-09-18, the only dependencies that
can't be satisfied automatically are python, and pywin32 which is
needed only on Windows).
  * The quickstart.html is intended to be as simple as possible.
Options (you can do it this way or that way as you prefer) or branches
(if you are in this situation do this, else do that) are strongly
discouraged from being written into quickstart.html. If at all
possible, please move those to AdvancedInstall.

binary .egg's of dependency native-code packages

For quickstart.html to work on your platform there must exist a binary
.egg for your platform of every dependency which has a native-code
extension module. Currently those are: pycryptopp, zfec, pywin32, and
PyCrypto?. If there is not a binary .egg available of one of those
packages for a given platform then this is a bug which prevents
quickstart.html from working on that platform. (Note: if you already
had that Python package installed on your system then you would be
able to setup Tahoe-LAFS even if there is not a binary egg of that
Python package available, e.g. if you manually installed the package
already or if you installed the package already using an operating
system packaging tool like apt-get. Nonetheless, since we can't rely
on the user having done that and since quickstart.html cannot instruct
the user to do that (see the section about quickstart.html above),
then the absence of a binary .egg of a dependency for a platform is a
bug preventing quickstart.html from working on that platform.)

AdvancedInstall

An alternative method to quickstart.html, is AdvancedInstall. This
method would be appropriate for people who prefer for the setup to be
done differently than the way quickstart.html works. It is also the
fallback for people who have tried quickstart.html and it didn't work
(although the fact that quickstart.html didn't work should also be
treated as a build process bug even if falling back to AdvancedInstall
allows the user to proceed).

pre-built Debian packages

See [DownloadDebianPackages].

as shipped by Ubuntu

Tahoe-LAFS comes with Ubuntu. See  http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/tahoe-lafs .