[development] installation profiles on drupal.org

[Steven Peck]

The consensus is to allow for install profiles to be hosted in project and
cvs.  This will allow us (infrastructure and the community) to learn how
things will evolve and figure out how to improve profiles.  

The people working on infrastructure are also working on a lot of other
things at the same time so there just isn't sufficient time in the day and a
limited number of things that must be done before other things are done.

There is no consensus on distributions as yet.  There are too many
unanswered questions on that side and not enough people to do the work.
Consider that many modules that some view as 'essential' to a perfect Drupal
distro have requirements to download third part libraries not hosted in
Drupal.org cvs so would make packaging incomplete and the packaging scripts
still would have to be written/tweaked.

The support requirements with people wanting to build a distro but not
support it remain unanswered as well.  Not counting that others are not
interested in supporting some third parties distro as support and
maintenance and release for Drupal core is plenty hard enough work.

Also some have mentioned that there will need to be refinements to install
profiles for Drupal 6 as some complications in how they are implemented in 5
did not become apparent until recently.

So initial consensus was start with profiles.  People could
collaborate/build/refine them together and learn from others.  Revisit
distro's later.  DWW is on vacation and those with rights on cvs are fewer
then those with admin rights on Drupal.org so there is some delay there as
well.

It's a complicated issue.  It will be resolved but not in a day.  It will be
like many things in Drupal, a lot of work, discussion and refinement will go
into it and then one day, magically, the end product will appear and people
will say wow, that looked easy, glad you followed my advice.  :D

-sp


> -----Original Message-----
> From: development-bounces at drupal.org [mailto:development-
> bounces at drupal.org] On Behalf Of Frando (Franz Heinzmann)
> Sent: Friday, February 16, 2007 4:57 PM
> To: development at drupal.org
> Subject: Re: [development] installation profiles on drupal.org
> 
> Robert Douglass schrieb:
> > This is a good idea and should be cross posted to the infrastructure
> list.
> 
> This has already been discussed quite a bit on infrastructure.
> e.g.
> http://lists.drupal.org/private/infrastructure/2006-November/007055.html
> http://lists.drupal.org/private/infrastructure/2006-November/007079.html
> or a little summery on a proposal at
> http://groups.drupal.org/node/2163
> 
> So there is some kind of consesus that, generally, installation profiles
> should be hosted on drupal.org. And there seem to be some voices in
> favor of improving the cvs packaging script to be capable of packaging
> the contrib modules that a distribution needs together with the install
> profile and maybe drupal core, in which I also am in favor of. See [1]
> for details.
> 
> However, I agree with Boris Mann here:
> If there are some install profiles, the hosting requirements on
> drupal.org should be created. But install profiles should come first.
> 
> So what I propose as a very simple first step is to create a new top
> level cvs directory for "install profiles", to foster collaboration on
> some first profiles. There is no need for project.module support for
> these right now as there is nothing that's suitable for an enduser
> available at the moment.
> 
> If then some first install profiles (e.g. a "blogger" profile, a
> "collaboration" profile or a "devel" profile) are in some kind of alpha
> or beta state, we should definitly approach the package script
> improvements and adding a new top level project taxonomy term for
> distributions (and thus allowing the creation of public, browseable
> releases).
> 
> 
> [1] http://groups.drupal.org/node/2163
> 
> > Jakub Suchy wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >> is it possible to create new project type on Drupal.org - installation
> >> profile? Some translators have created own installation profiles for
> >> their translation, blogger installation profile is proposed for Google
> >> SoC.
> >> Even people would IMHO notice, that something that installation
> profiles
> >> exist and the absolutely greatest thing would be to be able to just
> >> manage CVS which will automatically pack the profile into
> >> profile.tar.gz.
> >>
> >> Jakub
> >> http://www.drupal.cz
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> 
> 
> --
> Frando? Gaunab?
> -Unbiskant: http://unbiskant.org