[rt-users] Documentation for installing extensions

[Alex Vandiver]

On 12/15/2014 06:20 PM, Jo Rhett wrote:
> Again, back to “you must be a perl hacker to use RT”.  My entire
> point is that installation instructions can and should be
> self-sufficient, without requiring a person to utilize “common
> knowledge” of something they might not be experts in.

I've just verified that all of BPS' packages that we list on the
Extensions page contain an INSTALLATION section which is up-to-date,
which I believe removes any necessity for common knowledge.

>> I don't disagree that plugin installation could be made better, and
>> it's an area we'd like to improve on.  Where you've made
>> actionable suggestions, I believe we've responded to the best of
>> our ability.  The larger-scale changes necessary to make plugins be
>> one-click installs cannot, obviously, appear overnight.
> 
> Puppet modules are not one-click installations. In fact, I can’t
> think of any extensions outside of web browser extensions which are
> even a few clicks. This is not what I have said.

Nor did I claim that was what you said; it was what _I_ would ideally
want.  Apologies if that was unclear.

> I have suggested that the installation instructions should be
> self-standing and complete. This is a significantly easier task.

As noted above, I believe I've verified that all of our extensions now
contain up-to-date INSTALLATION sections, which I believe suffices to
mark that task as accomplished.

Do you think that that, combined with
https://github.com/bestpractical/rt/blob/4.2/installing-extensions/docs/extensions.pod
will sufficiently help new users?

If not, what would improve on the situation?

>> Where did you find you needed to add -I /opt/rt4/lib
> 
> Perhaps phrased more straightforward — what about your installation
> places /opt/rt4/lib in @INC ? Without that, it cannot find the
> RT-specific paths and makefile creation fails.

The Module::Install::RTx machinery, loaded from inc/ by the Makefile.PL,
takes care of checking the the standard install locations for RT, and
setting the installation prefix accordingly.  It is part of the package
itself, and not part of my environment.  In fact, if it _fails_ to find
your RT.pm, it should be prompting you:

    $ perl Makefile.PL
    Cannot find the location of RT.pm that defines $RT::LocalPath in:
    [snip contents of @INC]
    Path to directory containing your RT.pm:

...whereupon providing the path will cause it to carry on, and install
appropriately in your non-standard RT prefix.  Hence, if running 'perl
Makefile.PL' is failing for you, I'd be quite curious to see how, so we
can fix it.

> I suspect you’ve got this in your path because RT is your job. That’s
> not true of a normal person. You shouldn’t test in your RT dev
> setup.

We test things like this in clean VMs explicitly to prevent that.  If it
fails for you, then that is a bug -- and one that we certainly should
address.
 - Alex