Hi all,

Thanks to everyone who responded last week about creating an 
installation workflow. I've got that mostly sorted out, and am on to the 
next stage.

I thought it would be a simple matter to TAR up my pile of files. But as 
soon as I tried installing the package on a new server, I ran into 
trouble: my library server is a 64-bit machine, and the second server is 
32-bits. I normally consider that information to be unimportant to daily 
life (read: I really don't know or usually care...). But to my surprise 
that seems to mean that the tarball from one doesn't work on the other.

Is this a common problem? Is there a way around it? Are tarballs really 
mutually unintelligible? I don't generally recall seeing two versions of 
software being distributed. Is there a standard approach to dealing with 
this? It's just a pile of text (php, sql, html) and image files -- 
there's no compiled code of any sort. I would have thought it was sort 
of architecture-neutral. Except it seems that the packaging mechanism 
itself is a problem.

I did check out the book Erik recommended: http://producingoss.com/ to 
see what it has to say about this matter; all it says is "Use Tar!" with 
no ambiguity about architecture. Is everyone in the world on 64-bit 
architecture except this one test server that I have access to?

Any advice?

Thanks!
Ken

-- 
Ken Irwin
Reference Librarian
Thomas Library, Wittenberg University