Hi,
I have been packaging the Cherokee webserver¹ since around 2005, and
it has shipped with Debian since Sarge, IIRC. Even though its
popularity does not (yet?) come close to Apache (or even to several of
the minimalist webservers), it is a high-performance, very reliable
contender. Starting with the 0.7 series, it started also focusing (and
AFAICT it is where it excels) on being the friendliest for system
administrators. You can check at our sample screenshots² what the
webserver configuration interface looks like.
Cherokee has just released its 1.2.0 version - And this version is the
first to include a webapp market integration: the Cherokee
Marketplace³, an applications market designed for administrators to
easily install and pre-configure (free and propietary - Although
AFAICT right now they are all free) webapps on their Cherokee server,
and for authors to publish them.
Although I must state I am ambivalent towards the Marketplace idea, I
completely understand it is an important offering by Octality, the
company that has been built around Cherokee, and it plays an important
part of their offering.
Now, Álvaro López –lead Cherokee developer, Cc:d on this mail–
contacted me a couple of days ago, informing me they planned on
kickstarting the Marketplace on today's 1.2.0 release. We talked a bit
about it, as I am not sure how it would fit in a Debian system. The
main points (both for and against):
• Important portions of what the Marketplace is offering is already
offered by Debian.
• Counterargument: Webapps in Debian are usually not ready to be
installed and used when running anything other than Apache
• How does this fit in the FHS? Marketplace apps are downloaded into
/var/lib/cherokee/ows/root; they use the OS provided applications,
languages and libraries (i.e. PHP, MySQL, etc). Their installer will
give the user the precise apt-get command to issue to satisfy the
dependencies.
• Although the Marketplace should be active by default, it is not
usable until the user registers and provides the adequate
credentials to cherokee-admin. That is, the user must be aware he is
getting outside of Debian-land when installing their apps.
• The interface for managing applications installed through the
Marketplace includes a link for bug reporting (and
devolutions/cancellations). Users _should_ not end up reporting
bugs on third-party apps through our BTS.
...So we agreed I would present the problem here on debian-project,
requesting your input, and we can decide how to act based on
it. Please give me any pointers on how to go on with this - I must say
this in the open, I have told the Cherokee team in several ocassions I
am unsure whether Cherokee should be made available through Debian
(i.e. as they insist on supporting the latest version and not a
two-year-old one, or in managing their configuration through a Web
interface and not in a more Unixy way), and so far, they have
convinced me to keep doing so... But I feel I need your input before
packaging this functionality. Do you have any examples of other
applications offering this kind of functionality that are now part of
Debian? Or that have been kept outside?
Greetings,
--
¹ http://www.cherokee-project.com/
² http://screenshots.debian.net/package/cherokee - I should upload
updated versions :-P
³ http://cherokee-market.com/about
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