RM Meeting January 20, 2012

Agenda

1. Discussion of documents from last meeting
2. Supported OS as per comments attached below

• Should this be taken to to the list for discussion?

3. Wire frames sent out by Donald/Kirsta
4. Can anyone print these for the meeting, so we can take a look at them? The printer here won't work for me despite my pleas.
5. Continuous Testing Environment Update
6. Update from John on JIRA
7. Updates on Islandora 7 progress
8. Date/Time for next meeting.

Minutes

1. Paul and group discussed child/parent rels-ext relationships. Discussion about what Hydra is doing (rels are in parent), but that they index the rels in solr and don't use the resource index (should confirm that)
2. General discussion ... Jon would like to see official support for both Ubuntu and CentOS. Devs use Ubuntu or macosx ... impacts on testing, services, documentation ... etc. Jon will send a message out to islandora google group.
3. General discussion of the wireframes. Should we be using views? How would views work? Are we going to lose functionality if we use views? Donald and Kirsta will investigate Solr views and report back.
4. Donald printed the wireframes (thanks donald).
5. Some discussion about how to accomplish this a more efficient manner? Can we avoid creating a brand new server? Snapshot of data directory and mysql db ... Still haven't decided who is hosting this, or what resources will be dedicated.
6. No update.

Attendees

Jonathan, Paul, Ben, Donald

From Gervais & Richard re: supported OS

+History+ The Dell hardware that we run requires that we run "Redhat" or Suse (I think)... Rather than buying a license for RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), we run CentOS which is essentially a rebranded version of RHEL

Lots of folks do this, btw and CentOS is considered a solid server OS

We have some vm's running Ubuntu. This was done as we wanted to experiment with Aegir and support for CentOS was sketchy at the time (I have not checked recently). There are some pluses to using Aegir, but also some minuses that do not make it a great choice for us. Also, when building a version of the VM (many versions back), Zac wanted to use Ubuntu. So the downloadable Ubuntu-32-bit version was born and this is also what has been converted into Sandbox.

+OS Choice+ IMO, we should officially support CentOS 5.x as the majority of our experience is with this OS. CentOS 6.x is out and can be unofficially supported as it is similar, but many people are going to be sticking to 5.7 in the near future. Ubuntu should not be officially supported, but should be lumped into a "all other linux" group (and to a lesser extent all other *nix OS's) that would fall under the category of "should work" but you are on your own (except for those of us who will answer on the list out of the goodness of our hearts). Windows is so different a beast as I believe that it should not be considered supported as a server. Like many projects out there, if someone wants to pick it up and support it, then they are free to do so... Along the same lines as macports.org or any other similar thing...

+Discussion+ We should officially support a single OS is due to the complexity of the stack and the amount of resources available to run our servers and offer support to the outside world. This is not uncommon when dealing with smaller "startup" software vendors (and even bigger ones). Look at the 2 (3?) Windows servers we have setup for the AVC because they have selected to vendors that only support Windows and also very specific versions of Windows (as in the case of Olympus' 32 bit requirement).

We have all sorts of issues with maintaining CentOS and Ubuntu servers. The dependancies (and often very specific versions of them) are a ton of work just to get onto the box... There are some that are built into Ubuntu, but require being built from source on CentOS and then vice versa (Imagemagick, ghostscript and our old friend kakadu come to mind as some of the most troublesome).

As we move forward with our own servers, we should consider bringing everything back onto CentOS (where possible) and tweak the Puppet scripts to have them all configured "just so." As it is, every script has to be written and tested at least twice (once for CentOS and another time for Ubuntu). For some things, the script needs to be reworked for versions of those (ie. Special considerations already have to be made for CentOS 5.x or CentOS 6.x - we have one test server running CentOS 6). Also, if for whatever reason, we need to move a VM to real hardware, this process is made simpler if the VM is already running CentOS as Ubuntu can not be installed on bare metal.

If there is a good solid reason to support a different OS, then a LTS version of Ubuntu should be considered above others.

I'm very interested in seeing how others feel on this and look forward to the discussion. :)

Richard: I am inclined to agree with Gervais' idea of only supporting one OS. With so many differences between the OSs it makes it difficult to setup and document our stack. Even in different versions of PHP (5.2 vs 5.3) there are large differences and I would be happier if we only supported one version of that as well. This isn't to say that we shouldn't help with issues on other OSs but it should be clear that there may not be anyone who can help. I like Ubuntu as an OS but we are married to a Redhat derivative because of the hardware that we run.