[LON-CAPA-dev] Gentoo Install

[Jeremy Bowers]

Josh Tacey wrote:
> Just a quick note to everyone,
> 
> You CAN get lon-capa to install and work on a Gentoo install.  It 
> "seems" faster than redhat, but that may just be my own judgment :P
> 
> It didn't include too much pain and suffering.
> 
> loncontrol had to be changed, and the fedora makefile patches that are 
> in my module were also needed.

If you look in my modules directory (jerf), you'll find a portage 
overlay that is probably out-of-date, but tries to get to the point 
where "emerge loncapa" would work. I had it working in 0.6.2, except I 
think I did miss the HTML::Parser patch (unless that's part of "make 
install"?). I got some of the fiddly bits correct, such as the mod_auth 
modification that loncapa needs.

If you'd like to update that and take out the Perl modules I had to add 
that are probably now in standard portage, that may provide you with a 
good starting point to get it not just running *in* Gentoo, but running 
it as part of Gentoo with complete packaging support.

I don't guarentee anything (mod_auth_loncapa should probably block 
mod_auth, which would require adding something in DEPEND), but it has a 
lot of the grunt work done for you. I was actually using that dir to 
update LON-CAPA, the only way to keep such things up-to-date, so except 
for the HTML-Parser it really should work for 0.6.2, and if you're 
interested in keeping it working on Gentoo, I recommend also using it as 
your primary update method.

If you get it good enough, you can distribute the overlay and give 
instructions on how to use it. There's more to do; see the README file. 
(Looks like tth may need to be moved into place after install, for 
instance.)

I would be interested in benchmarks between Red Hat/Fedora vs. a 
well-compiled Gentoo on the exact same machine. (Be sure to use the same 
kernel version in both.) But I don't expect anyone to think it worth 
doing, as I never did ;-) I'm still interested, though.