After nearly three years, I’ve decided that it’s time to say goodbye to Gladstone. I hasten to add, I don’t mean that the script itself will be disappearing any time soon: it’s still here, still available for download and isn’t going anywhere.
What I mean, though, is that I won’t be developing it any further.
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve tidied him up and tweaked all sorts of bits and pieces, ensuring that he works for correctly preparing assorted Linux Mint, Debian, Fedora, Sabayon, Ubuntu, Centos, Scientific Linux and Oracle Enterprise Linux distros for running Oracle 10g and 11g. As far as I know, every one works as intended (you may well have to click ‘ignore all’ on the Oracle Universal Installer’s prerequisite checks page, but actually everything under-the-hood is fine). I’ve even made sure it works with the latest Developer build of Ubuntu 12.10, so I can’t make it much more up-to-date than that. There are just a couple of instrumentation changes I want to make, probably by the end of the coming weekend, but other than that, I think he’s “done”.
Gladstone now therefore deserves a ‘code freeze’, because it’s getting harder and harder to make it work for new distros without stuffing it up working with previous ones. What’s more, it’s silly having to make sure he handles Oracle 10g installs when 10g itself is no longer available for download: that particular dead equine has long since been flogged past the point of useful reward. Additionally, trying to handle the imminent release of 12c in that mass of ancient and straggly code is going to take me way beyond where I am comfortable being, I think!
So this weekend will mark the point where gladstone.sh becomes ‘read only’.
I haven’t abandoned attempts to automate the process of preparing a Linux system for running Oracle, however. It’s just that I need something more maintainable, more modular, forgetting about 10g, but capable of doing 12c when it’s finally here.
Watch this space for ‘son of gladstone’, therefore, which will hopefully be along soon enough.
