thought of the day: bzr is making some developers' heads hurt.

[Wichmann, Mats D]

bazaar-bounces at lists.canonical.com wrote:

>> The problem is our project has too many dependencies, which is a lot
>> of effort to install: Oracle (its handy to use Oracle XE on your
>> laptop then you can work anywhere) php compiled with oracle bindings,
>> tomcat, jboss, apache.
> 
> It's always problem, and it requires custom solution in most cases.
> On Windows it's possible to create a sophisticated installer that
> will install and configure many components at once.
> I know Bitnami provides ready-to-use all-in-one installers for
> some popular solutions/web-applications, e.g. Trac, Redmine.
> I have no idea what is the typical way to achieve the same on Linux.

if it's really complicated and you anticipate lots of developers
or some coming and going over time the easiest is probably to
get the install right once inside a virtual machine and just give
anyone who doesn't want to go through the install pain a copy of
that instead (of course document the recipe anyway :-).  If you know 
everything is going to be available as premade packages it's also 
possible to do a "task package" - something which depends on all 
the other necessary packages, and perhaps does some setup, installs 
custom configuration, etc.  Of course, my own experience is you
don't tend to know everything up front and the config kind of
grows wings of its own, and then there's not much help :(