perfsonar development work

[Jason Zurawski <>]

Loukik;

Some context for the rest of the list list [Bug #65]:

I am required to specify the classpath while installing the services. As a
user, I am not really aware of the required jars that need to be included in
the Classpath. I looked into the readme file and it only said that I need to
make sure that required libraries are there. But I don't know which are the
required libraries!

I prefer the situation where I don't have to do anything with the classpath. 
It
should be autogenerated for me. Secondly, all the libs should be in the lib
directory anyway so, it would be easier if the installer tells me the value of
the classpath or even better if it does it for me.

What is more important is that if my Classpath already has wrong versions of
the  required libraries, things might not work and it will be extremely
difficult to detect the cause.

In this respect, Ant has an advantage as I did not need to worry about the
classpath.


------- Comment #1 from 

  2006-08-17 12:48 -------
Accepting, but the CLASSPATH is autogenerated in both installers (and it is
suggested to simply copy/paste this), so I am not really sure what else we
could do to solve this problem.  Sometimes it is necessary to get your 
hands
dirty and most users will have to accept that (especially when it comes to
previously set env variables). 

> Sorry, my mistake. I might have been a bit confused during 
> installation. For some reason I thought I had to write up the 
> classpath by myself.
>
> I agree that sometimes its good to get your hands dirty. My concern 
> comes from feedback from Warren Matthews who prefer it to be as simple 
> as possible.

I will re-tool the readme a bit to try and make everyone aware that a 
'CLASSPATH' setting string will soon appear, and we do have another open 
bug on there being some sort of option to allow automatic setting of the 
variable, but I really don't feel right about setting environmental 
variables for the user.  In my opinion (and this is my opinion, we can 
discuss it more and let some others weigh in on the issue) the setting 
of ENV stuff is a necessary evil, especially when other programs may be 
using java or the LD_LIBRARY_PATH on a system. 

I don't think Warren really got to the stage of actually setting up pS 
according to his mail, and that the requirements such as 
tomcat/axis/java/exist were a pain.  For debian/RH users especially we 
may want to consider setting up apt/yum repositories with binary 
distributions available of some of the software requirements to soften 
the installation blow a bit.

-jason