Restructure Prep, Prerequisites, and Installation guides to distinguish between required dependencies and optional ones

[johannes-darms]

What steps does it take to reproduce the issue?

The Dataverse Prep, Prerequisites, and Installation guides lists not needed prerequisites and also misses needed dependencies. Namely R, RServer, project COUNTER and ImageMagick are optional dependencies to enhance the functionality but are listed in the prerequisites section. Requirements for the dvinstaller (python,curl) are not listed there.

• When does this issue occur? Documentation Page Prep Section Required Components move Rserve: runs as a daemon to execute R code. to the section Optional Components

Documentation Page Prerequisites list ImageMagick, R/Rserve and Counter Processor as prerequisites. Within the descriptive text its mentioned that those are optional but it easy to miss that. Hence, I propose to move those sections to the Advanced Installation Optional Components.

Documentation Page Installation lists additional and assume other requirements to execute the dvinstaller. pqsql is mentioned but for example python3, and curl are just assumed to be available. It would be nice to state those requirements within the Prerequisites page.

[pdurbin]

@johannes-darms hi! These all sound like good suggestions! Are you interested in making a pull request? 😄

We have a fancy new Docker-based way to build the guides if you'd like to try it out: http://preview.guides.gdcc.io/en/develop/developers/documentation.html#building-the-guides-with-a-sphinx-docker-container

The only suggestion above that gives me pause is about RServe. You're right, it can mostly be treated as optional with one exception: the "download as RData" functionality cannot be turned off and requires RServe. There's an open issue about that:

• 8711

I guess I have a thought on ImageMagick. It's not strictly required but use use it to create nice thumbnails. Maybe there would be some middle ground: not required but recommended? 🤔