Moving this to higher priority. We want a turnkey installer that makes it very simple to install metacat and all of its required dependencies and can be configured wihtout being built. The installer should handle both fresh installations and upgrades from previous versions. It should work on linux, windows, and MacOSX, with highest priority going to linux.
For all installs, the installer should put both the metacat war file in place as well as the necessary dependencies such as tomcat. If possible, the linux installer should really be a binary pre-compiled distribution that is packaged for ubuntu using the .deb package format and for redhat/fedora using the .rpm format. These packages should depend on the prior installation of postgres packages (rather than shipping these), but should still ship items that can not be referenced via dependencies in the package files.
Once the binaries are all installed, the first access to the metacat server should bring up a configuration screen that requests the necessary information for configuring the metacat servlet. Some of this will not be needed on linux because the install packages can automatically create database accounts on postgres, etc. Once any required information is available, metacat should write that info into the metacat.properties file, install or upgrade its own tables as needed, load catalog dat ainto tables, configure skins, and do any other configuration that is needed. Then metacat can be accessed using the normal client APIs or web interfaces.