Releasing Bugzilla to CPAN

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

On 03/30/2010 08:56 AM, Gabor Szabo wrote:
> Sorry, I keep forgetting I am the only one who is emotionally involved in the
> open source projects he is working on. Others are in it only for the money. ;-)

	Hahaha. I'm involved in Bugzilla because I like it, for sure. :-) But
the elements that surround Bugzilla are technical elements, not
emotional ones. :-) If I were involved in the development of Perl or
another project, I might be emotional about that. :-)

> I guess if someone wants to install multiple versions of Bugzilla she already
> needs to know a bit more than just blindly follow the instructions.

	No, actually, it more or less works with blindly following the
instructions, as long as you do the Apache config twice for different
directories, and name the databases differently.

> BTW I think I'd recommend running "perl checksetup.pl" and not
> "./checksetup.pl" as the former also works on windows and AFAIK the latter not.

	Mmm, no, because Bugzilla uses /usr/bin/perl and "perl" may not be
/usr/bin/perl, which could be quite confusing when checksetup.pl says
that all the modules are installed and then Bugzilla doesn't work.

> With Padre we make sure all the extra files (e.g. translation files,
> templates etc)
> are installed in the share/ directory and then we use File::ShareDir to locate
> those files during run-time.

	That's a possibility....

> We could modify the perl Makefile.PL process to ask the user for the target
> directory where she wants to install the files and copy all the files there
> instead of some directory in @INC.

	That could possibly work, for the web files. I just don't like adding a
step to installation.

> I know this might be some change in the way you work with Bugzilla but
> maybe it will actually help you get some more Perl developers on the team.

	Yeah, but I don't necessarily feel that a distribution method should be
focused on (or used for the reason of) developers, when the product
being distributed is for end users (or in our case, sysadmins who are
mostly not developers). CPAN is mostly focused around developers because
it 99% or more distributes only libraries, and Bugzilla isn't a library.

> BTW, You know you can exclude the Makefile.PL from the tarball
> generated by your script...

	That's a good point. I'd probably do that, but it wouldn't help for
people who use bzr or CVS to checkout or upgrade, which is a fair number
of people. Also, even a simple "bzr status" would show that Makefile.PL
was missing, which would be slightly weird.

	Alternately, there could be a script that added Makefile.PL to the
distribution for CPAN, which might be better.

> Maybe put out a call on the blog - have you already added the Bugzilla
> blog to the Perl blog aggregators?
> to get some help making the Bugzilla installation simpler. There might
> be some people out there who would want to help with that.

	I've actually been working on that for several years, so it's getting
better. At this point, I don't think it's something that a brand-new
contributor would be able to dig into--it's something you'd have to have
been hacking on Bugzilla for at least a few months to understand.

	-Max
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