On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 04:41:03PM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
> 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):
Thanks for bringing this up here. Hi Álvaro!
The main thought I had while (re-)reading Gunnar's mail is that of
similarities among this issue and other instances we might already have
in the Debian archive. For instance, while there are very important
differences, much of the basic arguments provided hold also for web
browser extensions and codec loaders in multimedia players. This is to
say that the problem is already quite general and will probably be even
more general in the future. It's totally worth to try deciding a general
Debian stance on this matter.
To that end, I think we should fix some basic principle which cannot be
renounced; the following come to my mind:
- Debian is a software distribution which provide upstream software to
users, integrating them together. Beside integration needs, Debian
strives to be as close as possible to upstream choices.
- For quality reasons, Debian declares as supported only software coming
from official Debian archives. No guarantees can be offered on third
party software, nor on their interactions with a Debian system.
Starting from these principles, I'm tempted to answer to Gunnar inquiry
by saying that as long as the (Debian) user is made very well aware of
the distinction between Debian-originated webapps and third party
webapps (and of the different risk/support trade-offs associated to the
two categories) it is fine to have the marketplace in Debian. One way
to obtain that would be providing in Debian a customized version of the
cherokee marketplace, in agreement with upstream, which is aware of
which webapps come from Debian and which don't.
In some sense, I feel bad about getting in the way of users at the point
of choosing for them that the marketplace would be bad for them. I'd
very much prefer doing an effort in explaining what is at stake, and
empowering users to decide on their own. Let's also keep in mind that
if we do choose for the users that the marketplace is bad, they'll most
likely simply end up installing non-Debian originated versions of
cheerokee, where we lose the opportunity of explaining the trade-off
that third party applications entail.
> • 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
Ideally, I imagine here that the Debian cheerokee marketplace will
enable users to discriminate among: webapp A, version 1 in the market as
coming for Debian (i.e. corresponding to a Debian package) and webapp A
at version 2, coming from a 3rd party source. Sysadms will then be free
to choose their fate: old-ish but Debian-supported webapp, or new-ish
but non Debian-supported (which doesn't exclude the possibility of
support from 3rd parties, of course).
> • 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.
I haven't checked the FHS about /var vs some "local" sub-dir of it (a-la
/usr/lib/ vs /usr/local/lib/), but as long as webapps are not in the way
of other webapps possibly managed by dpkg, that should be fine.
> • 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.
ACK.
> • 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.
Once more, if (the Debian-version of ) the cherokee marketplace is made
aware of the distinction between Debian-originated webapps and 3rd party
webapps, it should be possible to direct the bug where appropriate,
according to the webapp origin.
> 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...
In the spirit of mutual understanding of problems on both sides, I dream
of an agreement where the marketplace is in Debian and, at the same
time, some specific version of cherokee gets tagged as long term support
and is packaged in Debian stable release. I see advantages on both sides
in such a (hypothetical) agreement.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Quando anche i santi ti voltano le spalle, | . |. I've fans everywhere
ti resta John Fante -- V. Capossela .......| ..: |.......... -- C. Adams
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