Hi, Thank you for the offer.I'm not sure if that would bring any additional benefit at this point, besides adding some complication and slowness to the release process.
aprsc is not an end-user software, it's only run on the APRS-IS servers (about ~100 of them). That network of servers is already large enough in terms of capacity and redundancy. aprsc can deal with thousands of clients on a single node, and the network only has some 6k clients at peak times, which aprsc could easily handle on a couple of servers. Adding more servers just makes it harder to get the whole network of servers upgraded in a timely manner, and configured right, so adding servers is currently not really encouraged. Almost all of those servers (except the few Windows and FreeBSD ones) are already configured to use the private repo.
Sometimes we need to push updates to those servers rather quickly. Waiting for debian to release and repositories to catch up would be an operational pain at that point.
So, I'd rather keep those servers using the private APT repository. The repo has packages for Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS (YUM/RPM), and it's quite handy that I can synchronously push out an updated version for all the distributions with a couple of shell commands.
You may, of course, make an official debian package if you wish, but we'll still probably be using our local repository in any case, just to make the release/upgrade cycles quicker.
Adding receivers / igates / digipeaters to the APRS network, on the other hand, is encouraged, and packaging igate software (such as aprx) for as easy installation as possible would clearly be beneficial to the system.
On Mon, 15 Sep 2014, Iain R. Learmonth wrote:
Hi, I am interested in including aprsc in the official Debian repositories. I notice that third-party packages are already produced but there are a number of Debian policy violations in them that would need to be fixed before inclusion in Debian. I am happy to do the work to get these packages up to compliance with Debian policy. I'm wondering if there's a reason you've chosen to opt for a third-party repository over inclusion in the official Debian repositories? Of course, any work I do on this will be licensed under the same 3-clause BSD license you have used for the rest of your code so you may integrate the work into the upstream source. Thanks, Iain. -- e: irl@fsfe.org w: iain.learmonth.me x: irl@jabber.fsfe.org t: +447875886930 c: MM6MVQ g: IO87we p: 1F72 607C 5FF2 CCD5 3F01 600D 56FF 9EA4 E984 6C49
- Hessu