#14 Fill out installable package documentation
Currently, there are two sets of instructions for
installing Vesta:
1. The by-hand "classic" instructions:
http://www.vestasys.org/doc/getting-started.html
2. The page on using RedHat/Debian installable packages:
http://www.vestasys.org/doc/getting-started-installable.html
The latter is very short, and refers users to the
former for more detailed information. However, the
by-hand install guide is organized as step-by-step
instructions, not as a general guide of information.
We should go through the by-hand install guide and
extract any information which users of the installable
packages will need and either include it on the page
about installable packages or make a separate reference
page that's appropriate for users of either method.
Since someone suggested it, let me add that I don't
think we can abandon the manual installation
instructions. I anticipate needing to maintain both
sets of instructions for the foreseeable future (though
we may be able to make some of the specifics closer
between the two). Tru64 (which we're still supporting)
doesn't have an installable package. Any new platforms
Vesta gets ported to may lack an installable package
for some time. (For example, the next two I would like
to do are Solaris and MacOS X, and I have no idea how
easy or difficult it will be to make installable Vesta
packages for those platforms.) Not even every Linux
platform is supported by the packages we have now, as
some use neither the RedHat nor Debian packaging
systems (e.g. Slackware, Gentoo). Some users may even
have reasons that make it preferable for them to do it
by hand. (For example, keeping all Vesta binaries on
an NFS disk avoids the need to update the vesta-common
RPM on every client machine, which may reduce
administration overhead in large installations.)