I'm a little late to nitpick details, but capistrano doesn't need to be on the host/server. It needs to be installed on the user's computer as a sort of client. The other software requirement (besides ruby) is a version control system that has the files you want to install elsewhere (that's probably optional, too). I believe capistrano uses ssh to login and run the commands in it's scripts. Think of it like a super ssh/scripting client that runs multiple commands on multiple machines in parallel. If that thought scares you, all I can say is "be afraid, be very afraid" ;)
<br><br><opinion-based-almost-rant><br>I don't think <font style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" size="2"><span id="_user_ber@webschuur.com">Bèr wants capistrano to be the "one installer to rule them all" for everyone. I think our needs are similar; I need something that can allow me to deploy/update multiple drupal sites on multiple hosts. That's not the use case for the newbie setting up their first site.
<br><br></span></font>PEAR has an interesting installer, especially with the channels concept
that was introduced in their last major update (over 1.5 years ago).
Why can't we adapt a system to play nicely with that, so that a drupal
install is as easy as "pear install drupal/drupal.core"? (I know their
are other technical things needed before that can happen, but it's an option that we're getting very close to being able to do).<br><font style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" size="2"><span id="_user_ber@webschuur.com"><br>If said framework existed, we could use the same infrastructure to power whatever "human-interaction required" update system that many seem to favor with the system for those of us who have "multiple sites to update and better things to do than be playing with some @!#$%^ tarballs of modules".
</span></font><br></opinion-based-almost-rant><br><br>-- <a href="http://drupal.org/user/23318">Corey Bordelon</a><br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 11/22/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Gabor Hojtsy</b> <
<a href="mailto:gabor@hojtsy.hu">gabor@hojtsy.hu</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">On Wed, 22 Nov 2006, [iso-8859-1] Bèr Kessels wrote:
<br>> Questions:<br>> Would capistrano serve as a default Drupal install/update framework? Are we<br>> afraid of Ruby (as in: not rails, but the language)? Do we want to depend on<br>> a third party tool for our deployment framework?
<br>><br>> Personal my answers are: yes, no, yes. But I'd like to hear if this can even<br>> be considered for core :)<br><br>We are solving an end user problem with in installer/updater. How many of<br>our users (and user prospects) will host on servers having capistrano
<br>installed? If we are depending on capistrano, how many servers will we be<br>compatible with?<br><br>Gabor<br></blockquote></div><br>