[schooltool] Re: Current downloads

[Yves Moisan]

> On 5/30/07, Paul Carduner <paulcarduner at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I believe there is currently no support for running schooltool, and
>> certainly not CanDo on windows.  I personally wouldn't know where to
>> begin in making it work on windows - I imagine handling dependencies
>> could get quite tricky.  I'm also pretty sure there are zero plans to
>> support windows in the future.  If you use Ubuntu though, we are all
>> ears!

Hi Paul,

I know about Ubuntu and there definitely is a desire from my part to 
move on to Ubuntu.  Hey, I've got a disk at home with Ubuntu on it.  Not 
a big deal I know, but still :-)  Problem is though that the school I'm 
targeting is a pre-university school (we call those CEGEP in Québec) 
where IT and folks are windows-only.  We're in a "developed world 
country" and people fear change ;-).  About running CanDo on windows, I 
got it to run about same time last year.  It was a bit clunky, but I had 
it working.

I'm trying to fight a proprietary Schooltool-like app in that school and 
having SchoolTool/CanDo install and work well under windows would be a 
first step.  If they see it's too much hassle to build that small app 
they required for me (a scaled-down version of CanDo, really), they'll 
ask for a "safe solution" e.g. an Excel of Access app :-(.  I need to 
feed them their dogfood before I serve them Ubuntu sushi ...

> 
> I wouldn't say there are no plans to support Windows EVER.  There is
> no particular reason to think that the current source tree couldn't be
> cajoled into running on Windows with a moderate amount of effort.
> This isn't a situation where we literally have a native Linux
> application that could only run on Windows with significant
> re-writing.  In theory, SchoolTool should run without too much effort
> on any platform that Python runs on (and, I guess, libxml2), including
> Windows and Mac OS X.

libxml2 runs on windows.

> 
> Also, in theory, eggs packaging (which is coming along) should make
> this easy on Windows, as that should handle the dependencies on
> Windows just as it does on Linux.
> 
> We simply have limited resources and, in particular, nobody with
> expertise in setting up *production* Zope 3 servers on Windows.  

Point taken.

> I'm
> pretty certain somebody somewhere runs  Zope 3 servers on Windows, and
> last time I checked there was some code in the Zope 3 source code
> which more or less worked, but if it stopped working, I don't know if
> anyone here could tell you why.

Running Zope 3 on windows is a no-brainer.  There is even an installer 
for zope 3.3.1 that installs zope in the python24 lib dir.  Indeed I 
don't think it installs it as a service, but I don't mind having to run 
it as a runzope terminal window for now.  It's the steps after that that 
I need to figure out.  I checked out schooltool trunk and the CanDo2006 
(not sure of the exact name) branch last night and now I need to figure 
out how to move things around.

I know the Shuttleworth Foundation targets schools in developing 
countries.  But hey, in some respects our schools are barely above those 
in developing countries :-).  Having SchoolTool play nice with windows 
would open up a lot of closed doors.  My hypothesis is that it could 
even help folks in our schools here understand what free software is. 
If Mark Hammond hadn't done such a good job of making Python windows 
friendly, I would probably not have given Python a go.  Not because I 
think Python isn't good, but just because of the insane amount of 
computing inertia I'm surrounded with.  Same with postgreSQL.  No 
windows port means 90 % of folks in "developed" countries won't touch a 
piece of software mainly because of lack of exposure.
> 
> The problem is that for an application like SchoolTool, being able to
> run the server from a terminal isn't enough and can be misleading if
> people think they're getting a finished server.  You need to make sure
> it works correctly and reliably as a Windows Service to actually use
> it in production.

Indeed.  Thanx for both of your reactions.

Yves

> 
> --Tom