I had the pleasure of spending the weekend trying to get
Bugzilla
installed on a Windows 2000/XP box. I would say it took me over 8 hours to get
it set up correctly. You would think that an application built with
Perl, an established
cross-platform language, wouldn't be too hard to get
running on Windows, a popular computing platform. You would be
wrong.
It didn't help that the
platform specific documentation that comes with
Bugzilla is outdated and wrong. It also didn't help that there are some
compatibility issues with the latest
version(s) of
MySQL (which wasn't mentioned in said documentation).
Fortunately, I did find
current documentation during a random
google search
while trying to troubleshoot the issues I was having. What amazes me is
that someone spent the time to write up a
nice, detailed guide
that you can only find through a search engine. You would think that
something like that might find it's way into the official documentation.
That said, even though the
Bugzilla Windows guide is good, it isn't
perfect. It leaves out a few minor steps, and only hints at some
extra
utilities that can be rather hard to
track down for Windows.
To further complicate matters MySQL 4.0 doesn't take well to being
installed on any drive other than c:. It's possible of course. If you
want a hint: Copy one of the my-xxx.cnf files (found in the root of
your MySQL installation directory ) to your c:\Windows or c:\Winnt
directory, or even the root of c: Add the following lines in the
"mysqld" section:
[mysqld]
basedir=E:/MySQL/
datadir=E:/MySQL/data
Replace E: with the installation drive. After that, you should be all set.
With a few practice runs I can install Bugzilla on Windows in about 2
hours flat. Not bad, not bad at all. Now I just have to learn how to use my
newly installed Beast.