Standalone installation on Debian Etch

[Jonathan Share]

Hi,

I'm currently trying to get Continuum working standalone on a Debian
system and it seems that the documented instructions[1] are severely flawed.

If you follow the instructions directly

> ln -s /usr/local/continuum-[VERSION]/bin/linux/run.sh /etc/init.d/continuum

> update-rc.d continuum defaults 80

Then testing this on the shell

 > invoke-rc.d continuum start

things appear to work fine, however, when you let the system try and
start continuum at boot it fails. There are 2 reasons for this failing.

The first reason is that the symlinks created by update-rc.d are
relative causing the loop to resolve the destination of the link to fail.

Personally I have resolved this by replacing the loop with the readlink
command. This is part of gnu coreutils so I believe it should be
available on pretty much any system.

Once that is fixed the wrapper dies because it can't find the JAVA_HOME
environment variable. There is no way to set an environment variable so
that it is available in the init scripts. In line with the debian
guidelines[2] I would recommend adding a default JAVA_HOME in the script
if one is not present, currently you only seem to do this for OS X. A
sensible default could be something along the lines of

 > JAVA_EXE=`which java`
 > REAL_JAVA_EXE=`readlink -fn $JAVA_EXE`
 > export JAVA_HOME=`dirname $REAL_JAVA_EXE`/../../

2 questions;
1) How did the current documentation end up on the site if it could
never have worked as intended? Have I missed something obvious?
2) Do you want me to submit a patch for my proposed changes?

Regards,

Jon

[1]
http://maven.apache.org/continuum/docs/1.1/installation/standalone.html#In_a_Debian-based_system
[2] http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-opersys.html#s9.9

[Emmanuel Venisse-2]

On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 11:45 AM, Jonathan Share <jshare@...> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm currently trying to get Continuum working standalone on a Debian
> system and it seems that the documented instructions[1] are severely
> flawed.
>
> If you follow the instructions directly
>
> > ln -s /usr/local/continuum-[VERSION]/bin/linux/run.sh
> /etc/init.d/continuum
>
> > update-rc.d continuum defaults 80
>
> Then testing this on the shell
>
>  > invoke-rc.d continuum start
>
> things appear to work fine, however, when you let the system try and
> start continuum at boot it fails. There are 2 reasons for this failing.
>
> The first reason is that the symlinks created by update-rc.d are
> relative causing the loop to resolve the destination of the link to fail.
>
> Personally I have resolved this by replacing the loop with the readlink
> command. This is part of gnu coreutils so I believe it should be
> available on pretty much any system.
>
> Once that is fixed the wrapper dies because it can't find the JAVA_HOME
> environment variable. There is no way to set an environment variable so
> that it is available in the init scripts. In line with the debian
> guidelines[2] I would recommend adding a default JAVA_HOME in the script
> if one is not present, currently you only seem to do this for OS X. A
> sensible default could be something along the lines of
>
>  > JAVA_EXE=`which java`
>  > REAL_JAVA_EXE=`readlink -fn $JAVA_EXE`
>  > export JAVA_HOME=`dirname $REAL_JAVA_EXE`/../../
>
> 2 questions;
> 1) How did the current documentation end up on the site if it could
> never have worked as intended? Have I missed something obvious?

We don't have a Debian for tests so we let users to send us their process.


> 2) Do you want me to submit a patch for my proposed changes?


Yes, please.

Emmanuel

>
> Regards,
>
> Jon
>
> [1]
>
> http://maven.apache.org/continuum/docs/1.1/installation/standalone.html#In_a_Debian-based_system
> [2] http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-opersys.html#s9.9
>