[request-tracker-maintainers] Running multiple instances of RT on Debian

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Mon, Apr 01, 2013 at 07:43:50PM +0100, Valmiky Arquissandas wrote:
> First of all, if this isn't the most appropriate way of asking this question (to the Debian package maintainers), please tell me what's the best approach for further questions like this.

This is a good way :)

> I'd like to ask what is the "right" way of having multiple instances of request tracker running from a single Debian package.
> It is easy to do so from the sources, I would just have to install RT several times, but for future maintainability, I'd rather have RT installed from the Debian package than from the sources.
> 
> Is there any way of having multiple instances of RT from the package? If not, would a patch that would allow that be welcome?
> 
> (If this is relevant, I'm talking about RT 4)

This was discussed recently on the rt-users list:

http://lists.bestpractical.com/pipermail/rt-users/2013-March/079636.html

At the moment you can run an RT3.8 instance and an RT4 instance
concurrently, but that has more to do with major API changes than
concurrent running. It ought to be reasonably straightforward to run
multiple instances sharing the codebase, but it's not quite as simple as
I implied it would be on the above post, sadly, since various paths are
hard-coded into RT::Generated.

The simple way would probably be to push an instance-specific perl lib
onto @INC with a replacement RT::Generated, but that's not particularly
elegant.

Ideally I think I'd like to see the config path overridable via an
environment variable, and everything else currently in RT::Generated
moved to the config file, but that needs be discussed upstream first;
I don't want an invasive patch like that going into the Debian package
for any length of time.

There may be other techniques I've not thought of too, of course!

So, patches (in the form of documentation describing a worked example
of the RT::Generated overriding hack, and to implement something nice
in the code) certainly welcome! It might be worth creating a wishlist
bug in Debian to track this, too.

There are no plans to allow co-installation of arbitrary versions, as
Debian isn't really suited to that - but I suspect you weren't thinking
about that anyway.

Cheers,
Dominic.

-- 
Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
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