Re: A lot of pending packages
Johan Van de Wauw wrote:
> 2010/6/11 Tanguy Ortolo <tanguy+debian@ortolo.eu>:
>
>> * dokuwiki, a PHP-based wiki, that I co-maintain with a DD that has
>> almost no time to sponsor me and suggested me to find another sponsor:
>> such a package (PHP, web application) seems to interest nobody.
>>
>
> Which should not really come as a surprise. First of all, not many
> people actually use packaged php applications. According to popcon,
> drupal6 has only 444 installations, with only 13 'recent' users[1].
> The number will be an underestimation as many servers won't have
> popcon installed, but still...
>
> Not many webapplications have an upstream which supports legacy
> versions, which means that it is up to the sponsor/maintainer to do
> so. While the same is true for many packages in debian, the security
> consequenses are usually more severe for a web app than for most
> desktop applications.
>
> If packages have a high chance of being hardly installed (because most
> people use upstream releases and not the debian packages, which
> happens a lot for php programs) and require a lot of work to support,
> it should be carefully considered whether we really want them in
> debian.
>
> [1]http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=drupal6
>
I don't agree with you on the reasons. The thing is, PHP applications in
Debian
aren't made to support multiple instance. The result being that it
doesn't make
sense to use them, because you wont be able to have more than a single site
with it.
If there was a move toward multiple instances using a single package, I am
quite sure that the situation would be different.
Also, yes, popcon is almost never installed on servers... The reason, IMHO,
must be that servers most of the time are setup automatically, and you don't
even see the popcon question. I wonder if it would be possible to have
popcon
debconf's answer set to yes by default! :)
Thomas
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