Installation advice

[tcpip]

Pointed here by the dw-discuss mailing list

I am installing a development version of Dreamwidth with a view for making it a shared collaboration space for Australia's researchers.

I have followed the instructions - to the letter from http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Dreamwidth_Scratch_Installation on dreamwidth.domain.tld

However I am receiving the "If you've gotten this error, it means that something is currently (and, with luck, temporarily) broken. Please wait five minutes and try again." page instead of a happy pinkish DW page.

I'd like to get this working so we can throw some development energy into it :)

Comments

[mark]

First question is: are you using dw-nonfree, or not?

Second, what's in your Apache error log? This should be in /var/log/apache2/error.log and when you try to access a page you should see some error or another.

[tcpip]

As per http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Dreamwidth_Scratch_Installation#Downloading_the_Dreamwidth_code I believe it is free and non-free.

In the apache logs I'm reporting a seg fault on a child process in the error.log

I should also mention one very slight deviation from the install from scratch guide; I'm using Debian rather than Ubuntu.

[exor674]

What mod_perl version are you using? I believe you need at least... 2.0.4 and Perl > 5.10

[tcpip]

Installed by package, I'm running 2.0.4-5

[exor674]

mpm_prefork?

[tcpip]

Using threaded MPMs, according to the test on http://perl.apache.org/docs/2.0/user/install/install.html#Prerequisites

[exor674]

Yeah, you need prefork for Dreamwidth code.
Installing the apache2-mpm-prefork package should take care of it for you.

[tcpip]

Meh. I gave that a go too, but it didn't work for me. I'll have another shot tomorrow.

Thanks for your help btw, it really is appreciated. I owe you a beer. At the very least.

[mark]

Yeah, what Dre said. If you're getting segfaults it's probably a mismatch on the version of mod_perl. There's some bad interaction with our code and mod_perl 2.0.3 and earlier that causes issues.

Let us know what version of that and Perl you're running?

[tcpip]

Running version 2.0.4-5 and Perl 5.10.. So everything should be fine, right?

[mark]

Just bumping this as I haven't heard if you succeeded or not. Yes, those versions should be fine!

[tcpip]

Thanks for the attentive bump :)

Well, I've decided to start again, having returned from a nice holiday and all...

I've followed the guidelines for installation from scratch. For the time being, I'm skipping the dw-nonfree part.

When updating the tip however I notice it falls in a screaming heap on the second run of the cvsreport.pl, which I don't think should be the case :) .. i.e.,

main <- dw-free t/webreq.t
dw@dreamwidth:~$ bin/cvsreport.pl -sync -cvsonly
Mercurial directory 'perlbal' doesn't exist under /home/dw/cvs. Re-run vcv with --checkout for me to automatically get it for you.
dw@dreamwidth:~$

[mark]

Right, try this:

$ bin/cvsreport.pl --checkout

And once that's done, you can run the --sync --cvsonly step again. I should go fix those documents, the bootstrap script hasn't been updated since we made some changes, so it doesn't do the right thing in all cases.

[tcpip]

Thanks for the prompt response Mark... If you like, I'm more than happy to help with documentation.

When I run bin/cvsreport.pl I get an error message suggesting that Mecurial isn't installed! Which certainly isn't the case. i.e.,


dw@dreamwidth:~$ bin/cvsreport.pl --checkout
abort: destination '/home/dw/cvs/perlbal' already exists
Failed to run hg: is it installed? at /home/dw/bin/vcv line 202, line 17.


The relevant code fragment seems to suggest that install directory for Mecurial (which is done by package much earlier in the piece) hasn't been associated properly..


unless (-d $full_ldir && -d $full_ldir_svn) {
unless ($opt_checkout) {
die "Mercurial directory '$ldir' doesn't exist under $DIR_CVS. " .
"Re-run vcv with --checkout for me to automatically get it for you.\n";
}
my @opts;
if ($rev) { push @opts, "-r", $rev; }
system("hg", "clone", @opts, $src, $full_ldir) and
die "Failed to run hg: is it installed?";


[mark]

Oh, right. Okay, so long story short, it's because this used to be a SVN repository and now it's an HG repository. Right now, bootstrap.pl gives you the SVN one, then cvsreport.pl fails because it expected HG.

The trick is to remove it and then do checkout:

$ rm -rf cvs/perlbal/
$ bin/cvsreport.pl --checkout

And the documentation that needs updating is bootstrap, it should Do The Right Thing, not give you a half-setup system that fails. (I believe it's because it's updating to the wrong branch, one that is really old?)

[whobutdrew]

Now that I got past my first problem, I'm getting this one.

Should I post my error log here or in a new post?

[mark]

"This one"? Either is fine with me. You're welcome to post toplevel if you want more feedback, it's almost guaranteed to get answers faster than just commenting deep in some thread.

I'd suggest posting a comment to this post with a link to any new post, though, just so people can follow to the next set of comments if they want.

[whobutdrew]

Sorry, I forgot that this thread was almost 2 months old!

I reposted my woes here.