Installer Progress Report

Hi. Been a while since my last update, I've had a hectic week. School starts up again on Monday, and I've had a lot of things to get organized as far as that is concerned in terms of class registration, loan applications, shifting money from checking/savings/credit/loans etc etc etc... Basically I hate this time of year with a passion because it's the most stressful, the most expensive, and the most busy. Anyways...

I'm going to be about a day late on my release this week due in part to the above reasons, but mainly due to the added complexity that adding dependency checking adds to the installer. I put in some good time tonight and am close to completing the puzzle.

• Now, the post-install script checks variables passed from BitRock to determine which actions to take in terms of installing the MySQL/Tomcat services, starting/stopping those services, resetting the MySQL password, and installing the JRE silently. I can't remember exactly *why* we can't run the JRE silent install from inside of BitRock, but I do remember that we can't. If I get time, this is on my list of things to investigate.
• I cleaned up some "/" vs "\" issues in the dependency code to make Windows happy.
• I cleaned up a lot of logic in the dependency checking BitRock code to properly handle some of the environment variables, as well as the PATH variable.
• As far as dialog screens are concerned, the dependency checking version matches that of the "naive" installer. I'm still holding off a bit on adding in the MySQL/Tomcat/War to cut down on build-times, but that will all come tomorrow after I sort out a few last bugs.

The other reason this release is delayed is due to a tiny bug we're having with the "naive" installer (although it would be an issue with the "smart" installer as well). The issue concerns Windows refreshing environment variables. This poses an issue when the user changes some of the default data, forcing OpenMRS to read the runtime properties files. The idea was that forcing a reboot would solve the issue, but in my efforts today, that wasn't the case. Rebooting refreshed the environment variable pointing to the runtime properties, but Tomcat still had an issue loading OpenMRS.

The guys have been out of town, so it's been a bit harder to get assistance with these issues due to our schedules, so hopefully when they get back IRC will be back in full swing and we can get this issue ironed out. In the meantime I'll continue to work on my dependency code. There are a few improvements that will probably have to wait until next week because they will involve major additions to the C++ code, but I'll have some version of the dependency checking code out within the next day or so.

Stay tuned!