I'm not familiar with "adept", but I've seen how RubyGems works. It seems like a very good model to follow for command-line based installers/updaters. I'm sure it using some magic meta programming that can't be ported to php.
Has anyone thought about using the PEAR installer? I heard alot of hype about it in the PHP community at one point, then it died down. I think http://pearified.com gives a list of a few channels already setup.
We could create a drupal channel and have core, it's modules, and all the modules in contribs available through it. Then to install drupal core after they've "discovered" our channel, someone could do "pear install drupal/drupal_core". I believe it already has a bit of versioning/dependency checking built into it. I know that it is preferred to not rely on any third party projects, but (AFAIK) PEAR is supported with the official PHP project. If we do have to hack it to our needs, this could be a way to give back to the "mother project", so to speak.
This could possibly lower the bar of entry to installing new modules. Following with Bèr's philosophy, a decent web-based module retriever/installer/updater could grow up around it allowing an administrator to update their site without ever leaving it.
Those are my (likely over-ambitious) thoughts on this.
On 5/31/06, Bèr Kessels <ber@webschuur.com> wrote:
Op woensdag 31 mei 2006 17:16, schreef Greg Knaddison - GVS:
> I'm not sure there is a really great solution - especially not for the
> hobbyist who doesn't want to learn the shell but does want to use 3rd
> party modules.
My philosophy is: "Once you have proper commandline tools, or proper
libraries, interfaces will grow around them".
An interface in this particular Drupal case could be a plugin for plesk, or a
one-ring-to-rule-them-all-drupal module (running off a special apache on a
special port) that allows you to install modules on a huge flock of sites. Or
a YaST module that allows you to install modules on your local server. Or
apt-get/apt-reconfigure etc. And so on.
Imagine being able to fire "adept", the Ubuntu installer: select Drupal,
answer a range of questions in an ubuntu-configuration-wizard-thing, and then
find yourself with a running, customised Drupal site!
In the end that is far better for that hobbyist than any HTML installer built
into drupal can ever be. The more because letting your PHP app write its own
PHP (which is what webbased installers do) is considered extremely unsafe,
and therefore dont work on a lot of hosting environments. (And IMO should
work on even less environments :) )
Bèr