Re: [naviserver-devel] Roadmap

[Stephen D. <sd...@gm...>]

On Sun, 06 Mar 2005 18:17:06 -0500, Vlad Seryakov
<vl...@cr...> wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> Do you have any roadmap-kind of plans or thoughts about naviserver?
> Slowly it is getting to the point when it can replace all my patched
> aolservers, i already use it at home instead of AS. As i remember, the
> initial goal was to patch AS with all out modifications so we start
> using it instead of AS and then decide what to do next, right?
> 
> So,
> 
> 1. Do you have any thoughts about Web tools/frameworks we can bundle
> with it?


I think it would be very difficult to come up with a standard set of
these higher-level features that would please everyone.  I'd like to
see lot of extra modules in cvs though.


> 2. Which modules should be in the distrib?


Very few.  Less than we have now?  Does anybody use that external db stuff?


> 3. Docs are still needed to be addressed, when i do not have strength to
> develop late evenings i could write/add docs but which format we gonna use?
> 4. Do we need to refine installation procedure?
> After installation, going to port 8080 (this way no need root to install
> and test it) the user should see some kind of web page with at least
> stats and docs (similar to apache, that is the big hole in AS right now)


I'd like to change the installation layout.  Currently it's something like this:

/usr/local/ns/ ...
  bin
  include
  lib
  log
  man
  modules
  sample-config.tcl
  servers

I'd like to drop the enforced 'ns' so that --prefix-... works
properly.  I'd also like to teach the Makefile to obey the standard
configure options like --libdir=... etc.  This enables RPM and Deb
packages to install things under /usr/lib64 if the machine is an
Opteron, for example.

Also, placing the 'servers' directory under /usr/local doesn't make
much sense.  This is root owned so by default you can't edit your own
web content.  I think the standard place for Linux is now /srv, not
sure about the built-in configure default.

It also makes sense to me to ship some kind of server deployment
script.  So rather than install the default servers/server1 and try to
grab port 8080, the user would type 'nsdeploy myserver /srv/myserver'
or whatever, possible with extra options, and it would create the
hierarchy for them.  I always end up having multiple installations on
one machine.  The script could ask questions if you don't supply any
args, touch up the config file etc.