[MTOS-dev] RPMs?

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 03:47:03PM -0500, Timothy Appnel wrote:
> On 1/2/08, Dominic Hargreaves <dom at earth.li> wrote:
> 
> > application, I would like to make it possible to deploy more than one
> > instance of movabletype on a server with a minimum of duplication.
> 
> Not to argue good Debian or rpm packaging practices, but MT does
> already support multiple instances of MT from one code base using the
> MT_HOME and MT_CONFIG environmental variables. Using directives like
> PluginPath can help extend that function further. Not sure if that
> helps anything here, but its something that has been mostly overlooked
> and seemingly (to me) unexplored.

I'll need to check that functionality out, but regardless, putting
perl libraries in the system @INC is nearly always the correct thing to
do.

Plugins are probably an exception here.

> I've always want the option of installing CPAN modules on the system
> level as opposed to dealing with the content extlib, but as I
> understand it that practice was started as a matter of QA. If someone
> installs that latest version of a module that does some irresponsible
> and breaks MT Six Apart has to support it with a patch. Being at the
> whim of third party developers is not a good business practice. (Those
> people are crazy! ;) Perhaps the practice of bundling CPAN modules
> should only continue in the proprietary distributions?

I will certainly not be shipping the contents of extlib in my packages -
there are many good reasons why this wouldn't be appropriate for Debian,
one big one being the security implications - embedded code security
issues means lots more work for the security team.

I'm not saying that it doesn't make sense for sixapart to distribute
modules for direct use, but where MT is being shipped as a component of
a complete distribution, it makes little sense.

As for QA, Debian has its own QA procedures; any bugs introduced by
fluctuation in packages depended on would of course be fixed, and in a
stable release upstream versions are stable.

> What is the list of packages (and versions) installed into extlib
> anyway? I've asked in the past for simply informational purposes and
> never found out.

I'm essentially ignoring the content of extlib, and looking at what
libraries the code uses. There is a list on
http://wiki.movabletype.org/Packaging_Project, but I'm not sure how
accurate/complete it is.

Cheers,

Dominic.

-- 
Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
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