We could, at this point, change our setup instructions to

1. Fork the main Growstuff repo on GitHub.
2. Make sure libxml2 and sqlite3 are installed.
3. Run curl -L https://raw.github.com/pozorvlak/project/setupscript/script/setup_growstuff.sh | bash -s [your GitHub username]
4. Follow the on-screen instructions.

Though we'd probably want to test on more platforms and maybe fix the configure-on-Lion problem first. And maybe add some dependency-checking.

I know it may require more maintenance, but I think it'd pay of. It may be a good idea to try using something like soloist coupled with chef solo. One of the chief benefits is that the installation process would then be idempotent and could be run multiple times with no ill effects. If you'd like, I can also test this on Mac OS X Mountain Lion.

The fact that soloist comes out of Pivotal Labs bodes well. I haven't worked with it (or chef) before, but we should be looking at this stuff, and Pivotal do very good stuff AFAICT.

Idempotence would certainly be a Good Thing! Meanwhile, it would be great if you could test this on OS X. The way I've been testing it on the hack server is

1. Create a new user, say test.
2. Copy setup_growstuff.sh to ~test.
3. sudo su - test
4. run the script from test's home directory, passing my GitHub username as the argument: ./setup_growstuff.sh pozorvlak

If everything goes well, they should have a Growstuff checkout with "origin" and "upstream" remotes, and a passing test suite.

[Oh yeah, documentation. That would have been good.]

This appears to work properly on OS X. There was a problem during the rake db:seed step, but it appears to be related to something in growstuff itself.