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again: future of Moodle in Debian: ship with Debian 10 Buster in 2019?



Hi,

Is any DD interested in working on shipping Moodle with upcoming upcoming
Debian 10 Buster release?  This would mean the package should be in good shape
early 2019; and there should be commitment to keep maintaining the package for
some more years.

"Moodle is a learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators
and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create
personalised learning environments."  It's like the Free Software alternative
for Blackboard.

It's a huge PHP web application, it needs a database backend (MySQL, e.g.)  It
comes with bundled PHP modules from other upstreams.  Upstream ships a .tgz; I
believe one needs a javascript enabled webbrowser to be able to download from
https://download.moodle.org/releases/security/ (so crafting a watch-file is not
trivial).  The upstream team (hi Dan and Marina) is helpful and responsive.

Thanks to the work of Isaac Clerencia, Tomasz Muras, Didier Raboud, Thijs
Kinkhorst and others, Moodle has been shipped with Debian in some form since
2003 (moodle 1.1.1), see
http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/m/moodle/moodle_2.7.18+dfsg-1_changelog
.

Currently, it's in unstable only, see https://bugs.debian.org/807317 and
https://bugs.debian.org/747084 : I am the only person working on this package
and due to time constrains can't commit to helping with security support in
upcoming Debian 9 stable/stretch.  However, there _is_ an unofficial backport
to current stable/jessie, available from "deb http://non-gnu.uvt.nl/debian
jessie uvt", see https://non-gnu.uvt.nl/debian/jessie/moodle/ .

The Debian Moodle packaging "team" uses git on Alioth, see
https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-moodle/ .  There's also
pkg-moodle-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org .  (That one however is not very
suitable for development discussions since its archive is not publically
accessible.)

In april 2016, Nishanth Aravamudan and Steve Langasek worked on moodle
(3.0.3+dfsg-0ubuntu1) which is shipped with Ubuntu xenial (16.04LTS) and
yakkety (16.10).

It would be really cool if Debian would continue to ship moodle in some form.
And it would be very sad if we'd fail to continue shipping it...  I am willing
to spend _some_ time on making this happen.  However, if nobody steps up
soonish to help, I'm afaid moodle support in Debian will stop.  I'll upload
upcoming 2.7.19+dfsg-1 in a couple of days; if nothing changes that would be my
last moodle upload to Debian...  :(

Anybody interested in working on getting e.g. something based upon Nishanth's
and Steve's moodle 3.0.* in Debian Buster?  I offer to help.

Bye,

Joost



Op Wed, Feb 04, 2015 at 09:54:41AM +0100 schreef Joost van Baal-Ilić:
> 
[...]
> At Tilburg University we are running moodle on some Debian systems; we have
> an interest in keeping it working for us.  I basically took over the work
> from Thijs.
> 
> Op Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 07:47:17AM +0000 schreef Dan Poltawski:
> > 
> > 'Upstream' here.
[...]
> > Thank you very much for trying to get in touch with us.
> > 
> > I've been cc'd on the Moodle debian bugs for quite some time and i'm
> > afraid that this is a bit of a cycle with the package. Quite some time
> > ago I was part of a team to keep up with keeping the package in order,
> > but eventually could not keep on top of it - then others like Tomasz
> > Muras and Thijs Kinkhorst have valiantly tried to get it in order. See
> > #494642 #647489 #747084 etc.
[...]
> Yes, it is quite a lot of work; Thijs managed to keep the package in shape,
> I'm convinced I can do it too.  However, I don't think it's wise to offer
> moodle in Debian stable
<snip>

-- 
Joost van Baal-Ilić                       http://abramowitz.uvt.nl/
                                                 Tilburg University
mailto:joostvb.uvt.nl                               The Netherlands

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