>  Mike Taylor writes:
> Fedora,
> 
>  The problem there, as I understand it is that Fedora expects
>  everything to be in one directory. This setup in inimical to the
>  Debian setup.

Personally, I would think that Fedora is well beyond anything you're describing as desired, but just as a point of general information:

If by the above you mean that Fedora requires the web-app, object store, indexes, etc. to be in one directory, this is certainly not the case. A simple default install will indeed put all these inside one directory, along with a Apache Tomcat install and Apache Derby plant (if you ask for those things to be configured for you), but that seems to me to be simply the most OS-agnostic approach. You can, however, rearrange the various filesystem (and other) dependencies howsoever you like. E.g. here at UVa we've used network storage for objects, other network storage for data, a separate database server, our own locally-configured Java container, etc.

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A. Soroka
Digital Research and Scholarship R & D
the University of Virginia Library