[vlma-devel] VLMa daemon distribution

[Adrien Grand]

Hi Sylvain,

I'm glad to see that you are still interrested in the VLMa development.
It is definitively a good thing to know the point of view of the
original developer.

Le dimanche 11 mai 2008 à 22:49:27, Sylvain Cadilhac a écrit :
> Sure, with this proposal the user may unzip the files into a folder,
> grant write rights to the correct user and run the jar. But this is not
> a clean setup :|
> The location of the files for a daemon application is really
> platform-dependent (%PROGRAMFILES%, Services, Event Log for Windows,
> /etc, /var/log, etc. for Linux): that makes difficult having a
> convenient distribution tree for all cases.

Maybe should I give a more detailed explanation of how I imagine VLMa
distribution.

In fact, my idea was to provide an OS-agnostic distribution. Sure, this
wouldn't fit to every OS way of organizing files but people are free to
customize the location of every folder. Moreover, we are sure that this
would work out of the box everywhere and there is no complicated setup 
but unzipping the archive. This is very important to me.

This way, we would be sure to have a folder to store the application
state, a folder to log into and a folder to put files which are shared
with the web interface without assuming that the user has created those
folders and properly configured it in the VLMa configuration file.

For example, this is what Tomcat does. The basic distribution consists
in a zip archive whose content looks like what I described in my
previous mail. However, if you want to install Tomcat on Windows, you
can find a setup wizard which will put everything where it should be on
a Windows system (even if the basic distribution would work as well).
On Debian, the package provided by Debian would put the jars in 
/usr/share, the logs in /var/logs and the webapps in /var/lib as usual.
This is the distribution model I'd like to apply to VLMa.

Cheers,

-- 
jpountz