[freeside] Documentation

[Jason Spence]

On Thu, Jan 11, 2001 at 03:17:22PM -0800, Jim Scott developed
a new theory of relativity and: 

> Has anyone put together some good documentation on how a person that is new
> to Linux would approach installing the Freeside product? I seen someone put
> together an RPM package for redhat but when I tried to access it was
> unavailable.
> 
> In any case I have started to install but seems that the documentation
> assumes alot of experience with the operating system.

Yeah, no kidding :) I've written some stuff that automates Freeside
installation (including all the Perl module stuff), but it's
encumbered by a contract I did.  I'm working with a client on
releasing it to the community, and so far it looks like I'll succeed.

Doing an RPM won't work very well because then you would have to
package up all the Perl modules as well, and that could be messy.  I
vaguely remember something about not being able to distribute anything
but the original tarballs for some of the modules from CPAN or
something like that, but it was a while since I last thought of
packaging Freeside up.  In addition, the install script would have to
locate the apache config file and then patch it with all the
settings.  I've begun doing development on FreeBSD and OpenBSD lately,
and I believe that the ports collection is far superior to the Linux
packaging methods.  For one thing, the installation scripts are much
easier, because you just redefine PREFIX and stuff to install the
apache, mod_ssl, and mod_perl ports under the Freeside installation
tree, and then Freeside has its own little copy of Apache.

I haven't tried with Debian either, but their packaging format also
has superior updating and conflict resolution tools compared to RPM,
in my opinion.

 - Jason