[Koha] Some thoughts about an »official« Koha LiveCD

[Mirko]

Hello everyone,

as of the last IRC meeting, we have a LiveCD manager and that leads
us one step into the direction of an »official«, maintained Koha
LiveCD as opposed to various more or less outdated disks that are to
be found scattered across the interwebs.

I was wondering if we should start to gather some ideas of what we
would agree on to be deserving the label »official Koha LiveCD« --
or if we would not want that label at all.

Some things that came to minds (to my own and those of others in
discussions about it) are

- being up-to-date
    One of the problems now is that a lot of the available liveCDs
are very outdated, thus carrying bugs and security risks. LiveCDs
are old as soon as they get out by default. It would be important to
have the latest stable version ready. I don't know if it is
realistic to expect a fresh disk each month (or even two, for stable
and oldstable)?! Would there be less stressful release cycles
imaginable for this kind of release?

- promoting liveCDs for testing, not for production
    LiveCDs are very common in GNU/Linux land and a nice way to try
things without having to go through a more or less complicated
installation routine and maybe breaking what you had running before.
But I think once you tested and decided to use the system, you
should go for a real installation and I'd like to see that promoted
to avoid having people run outdated versions forever. There is even
the idea of an expiration date for LiveCDs to decrease the number of
outdated, insecure Koha systems.

- promoting package installation
    Having the choice to install directly from the live medium after
testing would be desirable. The best/ easiest/ recommended way of
installation is an installation with Debian packages. I hope to see
the inclusion of this way of installation as a goal of the
development of an »official« disk.

- bug tracking/ transparency
    Koha development happens mostly in the open and can be observed
on bugzilla and git. It would be nice to see a »LiveCD« section on
bugzilla that is assigned to the LiveCD Manager to be able to give
feedback on bugs specific to this form of release, discuss
development and also have some people test new releases of the disk
before release.

There is probably a lot more I forgot but I thought it might be
useful to start a discussion about it. What are your thoughts on the
points given here, what other things do you consider important? I'd
be particularly interested in Vimal's views of course, but also like
to see participation by everybody else.

I send this email to both lists but I would propose to discuss on
[koha-devel]. Vimal, are you subscribed to the developer list[1]?
That would be a good thing to do if you have not done so already.

-- Mirko

[1] http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel