Piwigo, Owncloud, ...: doing it not right?
[ I originally started this discussion in the freedombox context. ]
I've been maintaining "home servers" for many years now, first using
OpenWRT and then Debian.
Maintaining those boxes with Debian is a lot easier than with OpenWRT,
thanks to the great job done by the Debian project: the
unattended-upgrades package takes care of the main work, and an
occasional "apt-get upgrade" takes care of the rest.
But there's always been a sore point: it seems that packages that I could
describe as "cloud service", like owncloud, piwigo, gitlab and friends
are rarely available in Debian, and when they are it tends to be
short lived (after taking a long time to appear).
IIUC this is due to the enormous amount of work needed to massage the
upstream package so that it fits well within the Debian system, abiding
by the various conventions, etc...
So at this point I'm wondering is it would make sense to have another
repository (a bit like `experimental`) to hold quick&dirty packages
which are "done wrong", i.e. where the packaging effort is minimal (not
good enough to make it into sid).
This comes from my experience with the piwigo and owncloud packages,
which were nicely packaged in Debian, but that took a fair bit of effort
and in the end I'm not sure if that effort was worthwhile. The benefits
to me when I installed the package didn't pay off in the long term when
I had to convert to the non-Debian-packaged (let's call it "upstream")
version:
- overall, I think I (as a user) would have been better served by
a "poorly integrated" package which stayed closer to the upstream
(the disadvantage is bit more effort at the beginning, but
compensated by availability of more docs since I can rely more on the
upstream docs, and if the Debian package disappears, conversion back
to upstream would be much easier).
- by reducing the effort on the Debian packager side, I increase the
likelihood that a package will be available and will be kept available
(and uptodate) for a long time.
So I'm wondering what people think here: would there be room for another
repository (call it `messy`) which would hold extra packages that are
not well integrated with the rest of Debian. I'm not sure if those
packages should be installable on top of stable or testing or both
(probably stable is the most important).
Of course, I wouldn't want such a repository to encourage maintainers to
give up on nicely integrated packages. The intention would be for this
repository to hold applications which otherwise wouldn't be in Debian at
all (of course, all those packages would have to be compatible the DFSG).
Stefan
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