Re: Suggestions On Getting A Sponsor
On Mon, Sep 27, 2004 at 07:56:37PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> The issue is that providing a package for a webapp that only integrates
> with certain webserver packages in Debian splits the userbase between
> those who have a reason to want to use your package, and those who have
> to do the integration work themselves anyway and won't see any reason
> not to download the tarball.
Eh, but who's using other webservers than apache anyway?
This is a popcon graph for all packages providing httpd:
http://people.debian.org/~igloo/popcon-graphs/index.php?packages=apache2-mpm-threadpool%2Cthttpd%2Cdhttpd%2Caolserver%2Capache-perl%2Capache2-mpm-prefork%2Cmzscheme%2Croxen3%2Capache%2Cmathopd%2Caolserver4%2Capache2-mpm-perchild%2Cboa%2Cthy%2Cbozohttpd%2Cfnord%2Capache2-mpm-worker%2Ccaudium%2Capache-ssl&show_installed=on&want_percent=on&beenhere=1
And this is one without the three most used ones (apache, apache-ssl,
apache2-mpm-prefork), so you can better distinguish the rest:
http://people.debian.org/~igloo/popcon-graphs/index.php?packages=apache2-mpm-threadpool%2Cthttpd%2Cdhttpd%2Caolserver%2Capache-perl%2Cmzscheme%2Croxen3%2Cmathopd%2Caolserver4%2Capache2-mpm-perchild%2Cboa%2Cthy%2Cbozohttpd%2Cfnord%2Capache2-mpm-worker%2Ccaudium&show_installed=on&want_percent=on&beenhere=1
Still a noticeable usage of course, but at the moment, popcon
respondents are mainly developers and people following development,
which will always show some extra diversity.
Besides this, for most package it'd be trivial to configure it for
people's own webserver, I know that for my packages, you only need to
set something equivalent to 'Alias' (or virtualhost), the rest of the
configuration is optional.
The real solution is, and there is been talked about, to have some
intermediate protocol to say 'make an alias for this to that', that all
web applications produce, and all webservers understand (at configure
time) to rewrite in their native configuration format. This is an etch
project IMHO, as maintainer of several web applications, I think this is
something that really should be looked into.
> > Certainly some people think that web apps should be packages. I know
> > there are plenty of highly useful and popular packages for web apps in
> > Debian right now. IMP, Gallery, PHPMyAdmin, LDAPExplorer to name a
> > few. While maybe not as polished as some other packages, they work very
> > well and provide a valuable service to the Debian community.
>
> Of those, I've used the IMP packages regularly, have never gotten around
> to checking whether the phpmyadmin package was usable for the use I
> would have had for it, and have found that the gallery package
> specifically does *not* provide the flexibility I needed for per-user
> photo galleries. FWIW.
This can be fixed, and IMHO a maintainer should look into that. phpbb
for example doesn't natively support multiple boards per package, but
as maintainer I've patched it so it _does_ support it, with per-board
configuration files.
--Jeroen
--
Jeroen van Wolffelaar
Jeroen@wolffelaar.nl (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357)
http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl
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