On 15 Apr 2017, at 14:22, Sergiu Dumitriu <[email protected]> wrote:
On 04/15/2017 08:17 AM, Vincent Massol wrote:
Hi Sergiu,
On 15 Apr 2017, at 13:44, Sergiu Dumitriu <[email protected]> wrote:
On 04/14/2017 06:08 PM, Vincent Massol wrote:
On 14 Apr 2017, at 22:34, Sergiu Dumitriu <[email protected]> wrote:
On 04/14/2017 09:51 AM, Thomas Mortagne wrote:
Here is a new proposal on this subject.
This supersets the following threads: * http://markmail.org/message/mhhurc7lbyfanph7 * http://markmail.org/message/nav5a77hzmhq4gq6 * http://markmail.org/message/fd5ijxdquzdhtykw
We discussed with other committers (Vincent and Ludovic) and came to the conclusion that it was not core dev team job to provide a specific flavor like Knowledge Base and that we should focus only on a very generic one (pretty much XE without the Blog).
Here are the details:
= One flavor
We develop only 1 flavor located in xwiki-platform repository. It's a generic flavor not targeting any specific use case (the first version with be XE without the Blog). We will discuss the name in another thread later, let's call it "Wiki Flavor" for now.
Of course everyone is free and welcomed to build lots of contrib flavors which will be proposed when you install XWiki ("Development Flavor", "Demo Flavor", "Blog Flavor", etc.).
= No "Base flavor"
But platform will provide an extension that can be used as dependency by various flavors to get "core" UI extensions that we think make sense in any kind of flavor.
= Demo package
We currently have a jetty/hsqldb based package in platform which let you choose which flavor you want. We will show it in the download page.
We will add another one with the Wiki Flavor already installed in it (pretty much like the XE jetty/hsqldb package). Listed on the download page too.
Why? Is it that bad to always let the user choose the flavor? We can split flavors into three levels:
- The "Raw XWiki" flavor is on top, pre-selected - Recommended flavors are next, in a list - All flavors behind a "browse more" button
The only case when leaving the standalone package empty might fail is in a no-internet environment, but for this we can have a workaround: make the jars, xars and poms needed for installing the base flavor available in the package.
Yes the reason is for the offline test use case.
Bundling all flavors could be a solution indeed but it seems a bit overkill to me, especially if the user only wants a single one, don’t you think?
Indeed, that's why I said "needed for installing the _base_ flavor". If XWiki detects that it can't fetch the list of flavors from the internet, instead of displaying the "select flavor to install" screen, it will display an alternative "no internet connection detected, install a base wiki or leave the wiki completely empty" screen.
Ok I get it. That could work but we would need to implement it and always use the locally available flavor extensions even if there’s an internet connection since installing from internet is much longer (several additional minutes) and we need to offer the best possible testing/first-time experience.
Depending on how this is implemented, this can also solve another issue: installing war snapshots. This is something that some of the PhenoTips users have been asking about, and while possible, it's not as easy as just putting the war in Tomcat and running the distribution wizard.
I don’t understand what this means. What are the issues? What would your users need/want? Thanks -Vincent
And sponsoring companies must be also be able to provide a ZIP with their flavor pre-installed or locally available. We would provide a link to their page providing the download.
It could indeed save us one packaging.
@Thomas: WDYT?
Thanks -Vincent
Thanks
-Vincent
Everything else sounds good, +1.
We don't maintain exe/jar installers anymore in platform, they die with XWiki Enterprise. They are a real pain to maintain and we are actually failing since they don't really work properly everywhere they are supposed to work. It does not worth the trouble for what is not a production ready package and it's better anyway to make more clear XWiki is a server thing.
WDYT ?