why is mysql required? [fixed]

answered Sep 11 '10

Evgeny
4735 ● 29 ● 43 ● 58
http://askbot.org/

updated Sep 11 '10

Of course MySQL should not be required as well as some other dependencies and looks like it's actually possible to run askbot on sqlite (thanks to Onur) and postgres.

The problem that we have to solve here is how to satisfy different needs without getting in the users' way too much. One can imagine the following scenarios:

• someone wants a "turn key" running forum
• or instead they want to just get the askbot app alone and are willing to tinker with details of installation
• select a database engine from a "pre-approved" list (there are quite specific version and config requirements even for MySQL - to make full text search work, for postgres FTS there is also a specific version requirement)
• user may want to try a different database engine (perhaps one that was not yet tested)
• install askbot in local directory (good idea if user wants to tweak skins or develop code - and in this case checkout is highly advised) or system directory (for production use only)
• or they might want to install into a virtual environment
• or (for shared hosts) - install into an alternate location - with or without things like django and database adapters
• use a different version of Django (even one that was not tested with askbot yet)

What would really be great is to come up with a flexible setup.py script and the follow-up deployment script, otherwise there is no way to make adoption of askbot easy for most users.