dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Lars Helge Øverland <larshelge@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 8:48 AM, Jason Pickering <jason.p.pickering@xxxxxxxxx
> wrote:

> Hi there. All these sound like great suggestions, but I think we need to
> make a decision soon about what to do. I have some suggestions.
>
> 1) We should perhaps consider forking the installer off the main branch, as
> Knut has suggested. This could have the advantage of bringing in a larger
> crowd that wants to work on installers for OpenXData, OpenMRS, DHIS, etc
> packaged together. The installer itself, in its current incarnation, has no
> direct dependencies on the trunk code, so it would be simple enough to do
> this. However, I feel we are losing focus somewhat. It may not help to try
> and worry about every single type of installation that is necessary .We have
> identified a key requirement, which is a basic installer for DHIS2 with
> either H2 or Postgres. This is what I have been continuing to work on based
> on this requirement.
>

I would say we keep it in trunk. At least until we have somewhat of a
product to show.


>
> 2) More techie stuff now. Installation of Postgres without administrative
> rights, AFAIK, is simply not possible. As Quanq points out, this is required
> in order to create a non-administrative user, which Postgres requires.  I am
> making the assumption that users are going to have this, otherwise a
> Postgres install will simply not be possible unless people know a way around
> this. The scripts would be useful, but Knut has already supplied some that
> will do the trick. It is simple not to install Postgres as a service if
> needed, and launch it at runtime. I see pros and cons for this, mostly
> related to the use of PivotTables, which would require Postgres to be
> running. It may not be intuitive to users to launch the database prior to
> using Excel. I have a rather modest little laptop, and have noticed no
> resource issues really, with Postgres running in the background.  I think we
> should go that route, and that is how I have been testing the BitRock
> installer thus far.
>
>
Installing as a service seems fine to me if admin rights are required
anyway. I think the real problem is the conflict-with-existing-installations
one. Can we install it with a specific service name and on a specific port?
And could it then co-exist with other postgres services?


> I must say though, I am still a bit confused why we are not considering the
> H2 approach more? I have an installer already for this, and it works like a
> charm, at least on a stock XP machine.
>

Well its a good point. I can only say that postgres is more proven, more
people have knowledge about it, it provides better supportive applications
(pgadmin), and I have experienced problems with importing large amounts of
data with H2. But H2 is improving and we will definitely have "full H2
compliance" as a goal.


>
> I have taken a look at .embedding the JRE which is simple, but it would
> require a change to the DHIS2 Live app, which of course would break other
> DHIS2 live installs that may not use the embedded JRE that we would package
> with the installer. We could alter the Live app source code at the builder
> compile time, to suit the needs of the installer. Better yet, would be a
> config file for the app that we could write during the installation, which
> could read the JRE location. Maybe we could use this for other properties,
> like memory settings as well.
>
>
Yeah I'm sure we (Bob?) could do some magic here and the JRE is only 15 mb.
So I'll say we go for it.

Lars