Sunday 15 March 2009

Installing SemanticResultFormats

Programming is what I used to do a lot. The reason why I am programming again is because I am working on the documentation for the Wikiation Installer. I cannot document properly what I do not really understand and programming some installer scripts is one way of getting to grips with the issues.

I am testing in the "Fosdem" environment, this is where developers may test the existing functionality... I did install Semantic MediaWiki and I decided that I wanted to install SemanticResultFormats as well. I read the documentation and I found that due to a non standard include, I had to write an installer script. This is annoying but trivial

I tested it, the version special page reports it as being installed so I was good. However, it struck me that SemanticResultFormats has in SemanticMediaWiki a prerequisite. So I dabbled some more in the download.sh only to come to the conclusion that this is not the place where prerequisites are to be tested. The reason for this is that the include would be excercised anyway. When SemanticMediaWiki is not there, the whole installation should abort.

Writing installation scripts does help me understand the environment, it will help me write better documentation and in the mean time, I find where the software can use some more refinenment. I do confess that I am looking for the corner cases and so far I am really pleased how the installer is improving.
Thanks,
GerardM

No comments: