I spent a good part of Friday and today trying to figure out installation. It seems RT should be fairly straight forward to install, but it is not.
So today I finally got RT running. I followed the directions on the Debian bug tracker to get it working: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=869641
Is there a plan to update the package in the Ubuntu Universe repository? It only has RT 4.2.
Is there a plan on fixing the dependency scripts to allow a “standard” install to work on more distributions? The regular download did not come even close to working on Ubuntu 18.04 following the install README. There are a LOT of dependencies. Manually tracking down all of the failed packages is not practical.
AFAIK the Best Practical team does not provide any of distribution package. This is the work of distribution package maintainers. In current Debian stable (Buster) is version 4.4.3 as well as in Ubuntu focal.
Thank you for that post. It really helped me figure out what was going on. I think I will follow up with this part of my question in that thread, since it is fairly recent.
It is good to hear that Focal will have 4.4.
If I understand correctly Canonical tries to have a cooperative approach for packages in repositories. The universe repository packages are community driven, with no support by Canonical. They only provide updates to universe packages if they in turn are provided by the community. In this case the only way I see that working is if Best Practical provides or encourages that community.
Since this forum is the RT community for all intents and purposes, I guess I am asking if there is anyone providing that. It looks to be the case there is a package on Debian, and Ubuntu piggybacks on that as usual. However, fixes to bugs and updates in those packages do not always make it over to Ubuntu.
Does anyone have any insight or knowledge, or where I can find more info on this?
More details: I am considering an RT deployment with a Best Practical support plan. However, I still want to know what is going on. I am most familiar with Ubuntu LTS releases, so I am focusing on RT’s support for that. However it may make sense to go with a different distribution if they are better supported. I am ok with that but am weighing pro’s and cons.
We are subscribed to BP support plan. And have RT installed by our own from source, not from packages from any distribution. If BP fixes something for you and send you a patch which will be commonly usable (so it appear in next version of RT), it’s better to patch the core modules than RT local folder. Perhaps if you use the package from distribution you will end with many duplications in local to avoid overwriting by packaging system. As well as necesarry supporting perl libraries are better to maintain directly from CPAN then from distribution. You will be more sure what’s happening when you debug something if you have no possible duplications (or overlays) of libraries or functions.
However if you just don’t want to touch RT code at all you are safe to use some version from distribution. Debian or Ubuntu are good choices.
I see. In my experience that type of setup can be risky. Unless you have someone in house with developer level knowledge you end up locked into one provider, and you have to keep everything documented properly to be able to rebuild your system. That is certainly doable, but harder than restoring a database after running apt install : )
Current install README file suggests “you may be better off” installing perl modules through your os distribution. I see what you are saying, though. The fact that either option works is a good thing.
Thanks for your experience with RT. These posts certainly are helping me learn.