From Movable Type

Before editing, it seems to make sense to ask how we want to organize this. MT has certain generic requirements, some of which are listed on the requirements page, some of which are strangely absent (ImageMagick being a great example of the latter).

However, beyond generic requirements are the requirements by platform, rpm's to install, etc. I could make a stab at this for RHEL 5, but I don't have extra servers to test on.

Further, when thinking about packaging, some things will have to be handled by installation script, for instance, obtaining perl modules, setting security levels, and creating directories.

Process

Most packaging formats differentiate between required and recommended requirements. Six Apart has chosen to make Image Magick "optional" because technically the product can function without it. Some functionality is lost, but you can still blog. If we want to revisit that assumption for specific packages (RPM, etc), then I all ears.

What to do first

I would remind everyone that before we jump into building anything we need to build a list of every single discrete piece of software that MT relies upon. One we build out this list of prerequisites, the process of building the spec in such a way that will likely get adopted by core distributions gets a lot easier.