[K12OSN] SchoolTool Beta

[Tom Hoffman]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 10:54 PM, Terrell Prude' Jr.
<microman at cmosnetworks.com> wrote:
> Tom Hoffman wrote:

> In that spirit....
>
> Since I have actually looked at the Web site, I'm having trouble finding a
> tarball (that is, a .tar.gz) for the source code.  If we had that, then we
> could just compile SchoolTool on *whatever* distro, including the BSD's.
>
> Any way you could make a source tarball available, or a CVS/Subversion/git
> link where we could pull the source tree down?

Hi Terrell,

The source is at our Launchpad site:  https://code.launchpad.net/schooltool

That is an insane pile of branches, however, so you'd better just
follow these instructions:

http://book.schooltool.org/htmlhelp/dev_sandbox.html

The problem here is that SchoolTool is built on Zope 3, which has
recently been split into a whole pile (I don't know... dozens) of
separate libraries, which are distributed separately, and because the
whole idea of SchoolTool is to create a modular platform, it is split
into separate packages too, so that some day you'll be able to
download and install, say, the Maine demographic schema or the
Valencia demographic schema and whatever other components you need.
So packaging SchoolTool is a bit complicated, too.  It isn't just one
package, it is like, 50.  I don't even know what the count is.

We've put a HUGE amount of work into hiding this behind 'apt-get
install schooltool'  I hope people will someday be able to 'yum
install schooltool' someday too, but realistically, it is complicated
enough that it will take a little tangible demand for someone to
really do it.

I know this response is a little bizarre -- obviously we're very
grateful you are interested, and I don't want to scare people away.
But I also want to protect you from the scary parts.  And yes, there
are easier ways to make web apps, but there are also advantages to
using small, independent, reusable code libraries.  It is just a pain
to package.

--Tom