[sf-lug] python, subversion, jdk on the colo box

[Michael Paoli]

My first inclination would be to go with whatever the
operating system / distribution offers, ... in this case
CentOS release 4.4 (Final)
If that's sufficiently reasonable and works well enough, it
should be pretty straight-forward.

If not, ... well, things start to get more interesting.

Sure there's source, ... but how much of that does one want to
have to track and maintain independent of some reasonable package
management system (and/or incorporate and maintain into some type of
package management system)?  The answer to that will often depend
on the scope and complexity of the software, and requirements of the
operating environment (e.g. security and stability considerations).

Also, some distributions (e.g. Debian) have a very good mechanism
(the "alternatives" system, in Debian) of simultaneously having multiple
packages installed that cover some overlapping functionality - and one
can configure which is used by default, yet have multiple of them
installed (e.g. vim and nvi - and vi will use exactly one of those,
but both vim and nvi can coexist quite nicely on the same system).
I don't know that CentOS (or Red Hat) yet has any similar capability.
Whether or not this may be an issue or not probably depends on
degree of overlap of the version(s) and what functionality they cover.

$ date; hostname; sudo up2date --showall | grep -i '^python'
Fri Apr 27 22:54:58 PDT 2007
sf-lug
python-2.3.4-14.3.i386
python-devel-2.3.4-14.3.i386
python-docs-2.3.4-14.3.i386
python-elementtree-1.2.6-4.2.1.i386
python-ldap-2.0.1-2.i386
python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2.i386
python-tools-2.3.4-14.3.i386
python-urlgrabber-2.9.8-2.noarch
$ 

Quoting jim stockford <jim at well.com>:

>     I'd like to put one or more additional versions
> of Python on the colo box.
>     I'd like to install subversion, which requires jvm,
> which implies, at least to me, jdk.
>     Opinions? Advice?