Installer Project

[ryan.campbell]

Norman and I talked about an standalone installer project which could be used to house the IzPack files for an installer which combined Portal and JBossAS. The idea being to do a simple installer combining the two projects as a way of testing the adoption/popularity of this. The basic structure of the project would be:

installer/
 jbossas/ <-- existing izpack files from build/install go here
 portal-jbossas/ <-- new izpack files go here

Basically, you would check out this project parallel to jboss-4.0 & jboss-portal-2.2 and the izpack defs would reference the binaries from there.

If the combined installer is a hit, we could come back and mavenize the build so dependencies would be downloaded from the repository,

[ryan.campbell]

Honestly, we probably shouldn't break out the existing build/install Izpack build until we are sure this thing flies. The idea is just to do a simple installer, get Roy to talk about it, and see if we get some adoption.

But it would be a webstart Izpack installer that lets you have a fully configured Portal install (running on HSQL) in a matter of minutes. The goal here is to make Portal easier to *try*, not for creating production installations.

Norman's point was that people who install Portal in production are probably going to want to do it by hand, anyway.

[norman.richards]

I think no matter what we do (combined installer or standalone) the first step is going to be to separate out the installer from the build directory. It's the first step for every one of the scenarios we talked about.

[starksm64]

I think at some point the installer should really be build from the repository rather than checking out and building the projects going into it. This is going to be an effort to get a canonical representation of the server dist as it does not make sense to simply dump the 60mb zip file into the repository in my opinion.