Installing Mindquarry got a little bit easier
Adrian Sutton attempted to try out Mindquarry and failed
. To be honest, I have to agree totally to his criticism. Mindquarry is hard to install, as it requires two complex software systems to play together nicely: Apache (with Subversion) and Mindquarry, running in a Java Virtual Machine. To combine these two requires either creating an enormous package that contains everything needed by Mindquarry (and possibly duplicating a lot of existing infrastructure), or leaving it up to the user to find out how to set up everything (after all installing Apache 2, Subversion, mod_perl, a Java Virtual Machine, a Servlet Engine and setting some configuration variables is not hard for the average geek). We decided to find a middle course: We provide packages for some operating systems and a generic binary that leaves enough freedom to adjust the configuration to other scenarios.
. To be honest, I have to agree totally to his criticism. Mindquarry is hard to install, as it requires two complex software systems to play together nicely: Apache (with Subversion) and Mindquarry, running in a Java Virtual Machine. To combine these two requires either creating an enormous package that contains everything needed by Mindquarry (and possibly duplicating a lot of existing infrastructure), or leaving it up to the user to find out how to set up everything (after all installing Apache 2, Subversion, mod_perl, a Java Virtual Machine, a Servlet Engine and setting some configuration variables is not hard for the average geek). We decided to find a middle course: We provide packages for some operating systems and a generic binary that leaves enough freedom to adjust the configuration to other scenarios.
Adrian made some suggestions on how to improve the installation experience:
- Include the installation requirements, specifically tailored for the particular package, in the package itself. The Windows package should only contain Windows installation instructions, the Linux one only Linux instructions etc.
- Include even a brief note on where the heck the server is going to be running when I start it. A getting started guide would be better, but I'll settle for a simple port number.
- Write something to the logs. If there's a permissions problem and you can't write to the logs, write to the console when the server starts up. The logs should tell me whether or not the server started successfully at the bare minimum. If it does start it should tell me what ports it's listening on or what URLs it thinks I should use.
This week I have made following adjustments to our packaging and documentation (without modifing the souce code, so some of Adrian's suggestions have to wait for the next release)
- We have a VMWare image of Mindquarry available at the Mindquarry 1.0-M1 Download page for a quick start
- There is a binary installer for Linux and Mac OS X that checks that installation requirements are met, adjusts permissions and writes configuration files
- There are separate installation guides for Mindquarry on Linux, Mindquarry on Windows and Mindquarry on a Mac made using profiling support in the Maven 2 DocBook plugin. Of couse there is also the combined installation guide covering all operating systems.
Unfortunately I cannot test all configurations and operating systems beforehand, but I am happy to hear from your experiences and your ideas for improvement.
I am Product Manager for Collaboration and Digital Asset Management at 