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

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

Okay I wrote up an overview of my intended design of the Tahoe-LAFS
setup process on the wiki:

http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Packaging

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 .