Re: Installing VistA
On 9 Jan 2003, Tim Churches wrote:
> VistA is a vast, sprawling collection of modules each resting on shared
> infrastructure. The shared infrastructure needs a _lot_ of
> configuration, even for a demo system - things like system, hospital,
> ward, team and individual identifiers and lots of system-wide and user
> default value to make data entry faster. There don't seem to be defaults
> for these default values (or maybe there are, if you are M-savvy
> enough).
I really can't imagine that there exist no set of default values for
any program to get at least demo functionality.
> Then you have to choose which of the modules (seems like there
> are around 100 odd to choose from) you want to use, and how they relate
> to each other. Then you have to configure each module. Automating all of
> this with "Debian demo" values would be a serious feat of
> post-installation configuration scripting.
Well, nobody said that this job would be easy. I have to admit that
I hope to get support from Sanchez in this task because it might be in
their interest to simplify the installation. May be I'm wrong here.
> Certainly packaging GT.M and the various VistA distributions for Debian
> would help a bit, but not that much.
At least GT.M is a necessary precondition and thus a starting point ...
> Using Todd Smith's instructions, it
> took me about an hour from go-to-whoa to install (but not configure)
> GT.M and VistA, and that includes about 20 minutes sucking the (large)
> files across the Pacific, and another 20 minutes waiting for the VistA
> distribution to unpack itself (within MUMPS - the unzipping of the
> distribution files only takes seconds). So you might save 20 or 30
> minutes of time. But then the would-be punter would still be faced with
> the task of configuring VistA, and it looks to me like that could take
> many hours, days or weeks.
There is a nice tool named debconf. You could lead the user through
a set of questions. It is the package maintainers task to do it
sanely the give the user a good help.
> However, both GT.M and VistA sit pretty lightly on the underlying
> operating system - basically everything seems to be contained under one
> subdirectory for GT.M (/usr/local/gtm) and another for VistA
> (/usr/local/vista_gtm), plus a few environment variables.
I can't see a reason why this should not go into /usr/{lib,share}/{gtm,vista}
and these environment variables to /etc/{gtm,vista}.conf
> So, if you can
> find an already-configured VistA demo system, then it would seem
> feasible to just create a tarball for each of those two subdirectories.
> Untarring those on a target system and setting the environment variables
> would be all that is required to bring up a configured demo system.
So why not take all configuration stuff of this system an use these
values as default. I really hope that the configuration stuff is not
hidden anywhere under /usr/local/*. Damn, configuration belongs to /etc ... :)
Kind regards
Andreas.
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