[ckan-discuss] CZ-CKAN: QA plugin, Celery issues

[Sean Hammond]

On Mon, Jun 04, 2012 at 11:32:31PM +0200, Ondřej Vadinský wrote:
> Dne pondělí 04 června 2012 18.36:52, Sean Hammond napsal(a):
> > On Mon, Jun 04, 2012 at 04:20:36PM +0200, Ondřej Vadinský wrote:
> > > I installed it with:
> > > /var/lib/ckan/cz/pyenv/bin/pip install -E /var/lib/ckan/cz/pyenv/ -e
> > > git+https://github.com/okfn/ckanext-archiver#egg=ckanext-qa
> > 
> > You made a mistake in this command, uou've installed the
> > ckanext-archiver plugin into a directory called ckanext-qa! Let me know
> > if you can fix this yourself or if you want us to look into it for you.
> > 
> > (btw, We're working on an easier, less 'manual' and error-prone way to
> > manage CKAN instances.)
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > ckan-discuss mailing list
> > ckan-discuss at lists.okfn.org
> > http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/ckan-discuss
> 
> Oh, now that expains lots... Sometimes I just do not see...

I think these commands are quite complicated and easy to mess up, so I'm
not surprised that this happened. Anyway, it's easy to clean up, I just
deleted the existing ckanext-archiver and ckanext-qa source code
directories (both containing ckanext-archiver's source) from your
virtual environment, and then reinstalled both extensions with the right
commands. Any files installed into your virtualenv by previous install
commands should have been overwritten by this. At first glance it seems
to be working now, but let me know if you find any problems. Enjoy!

> Would be great if it all was just system packages, let the package
> manager do what it is good in... But since the okfn servers setup is a
> bit non-standard, I see little hope for that...

Well, one advantage of using Python virtual environments and pip is that
it's cross-platform, you don't have to build one package for Debian,
another for RedHat, another for OS X, etc. But I agree that they're very
fiddly.

There is already a Debian package for CKAN, but the problem is a little
more difficult than that, because we need a way of managing multiple
CKAN websites each with their own configuration, themes, extensions,
etc. Right now if we had only one copy of the CKAN source code on our
server (installed via the Debian package) and we upgraded it, then all
the CKAN websites running on the server would get upgraded to a new
version of CKAN, and likely they would all break at once, as the themes and
extensions they're each using would not be compatible with the new
version of CKAN or would themselves require upgrading. That's why we
have one copy of the CKAN source code for each website running on the
server, each of them managed using virtualenv, pip, git, etc. and we
upgrade the sites one by one.

What we're planning right now is a better way of managing things using
the Debian package, so that we could have just one copy of the source
code and upgrade it and all the different sites running off it would
just keep working. This means we'd need to upgrade the extensions and
themes at the same time as well, and if some extension or theme isn't
compatible with the new version it'd get disabled.