Re: [IBMiOSS] Opinions and experiences with ReportBro

On Wed, Jul 7, 2021 at 4:34 AM Marco Facchinetti
<marco.facchinetti@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

What make my afraid is the fact the ReportBro implements what today for me
is FreeMarker using Python.
But since they clearly states to install all Python libraries in a "virtual
environment" to keep it separate from system wide installations I guess
they already considered stability to be more important than other matters.

It's fairly standard practice to use Python virtual environments.

It remains to be determined if the complete installation can take place on
a power machine or if you need to use an Intel platform. This is one of the
reasons I asked if anyone had experience with ReportBro.

I don't have personal experience with ReportBro, but there's no
technical reason why it *can't* run in PASE. Since it is open source,
you can try it and see what happens. :) There is a license fee for
commercial use, but typically it is fine to experiment with it first,
and then pay the fee if you decide to put it into production.

I will say that it does help to have some experience with Python on
PASE to install major packages like this. ReportBro has a number of
dependencies, at least one of which is implemented in C. On a
mainstream system, the Python installation manager (pip) would be used
to handle all dependencies automatically. On PASE, some of the ones
implemented in C should (or in some cases must) be installed via the
system installation manager (yum), while others are installed using
pip. The best practice with Python on PASE is to create your virtual
environment with the `--system-site-packages` option (so that the
virtual environment can access your yum-installed packages), and then
use pip only inside the virtual environment and only to install things
that weren't installed via yum.

If you want to give it a try, you can ask for help on Ryver, or post
on the opensource@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx mailing list (which I've
crossposted to here).

Good luck!

John Y.