Infrastructure

Are there any constraints that would restrict from going with Tomcat 6?

WRT existing dependencies, they may be filled by other apps installed on the system, but you should still list the dependencies as illustrated in the metacat metapackage at source:/software/cicore/trunk/cn-buildout/dataone-cn-metacat/DEBIAN/control

The idea is that the Mercury package should be installable without consideration of other apps that may or may not be installed on the machine. dpkg should work out whether it needs to install additional stuff to support the app (e.g. if the deps have already been installed)

Since Tomcat6 is listed as a dependency for Metacat, it would be really good if Mercury could use that version as well - otherwise installation will be ugly.

Sure, I will prepare the dependencies list for the latest Mercury version.

Yes - Mercury can be deployed in Tomcat 6.0. The other two common packages that Metacat and Mercury can share are JVM 1.6 and [MySQL].

Metacat doesn't use MySQL -- it uses Postgresql or oracle. I've got the dependencies set up to use postgres right now. I am currently working on the postinst script for the metacat deb package to make it automatically install everything.

When you are setting up the dependencies for Mercury, please be sure to NOT install gcj -- it is a horrible nuisance. I notice, for example, that ant has a gcj dependency, so I opted to not install ant via the deb package system.

I'll be doing another big checkin for metacat soon.

Thanks, I will make a note on the gcj. for the initial setup, we will probably install the MySQL as a separate installation (not part of Mercury deployment package).