Post by Tom HoffmanPost by Paul CardunerI 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 Qu?bec)
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 ...
Post by Tom HoffmanI 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.
Post by Tom HoffmanAlso, 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.
Post by Tom HoffmanI'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.
Post by Tom HoffmanThe 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