Re: About the recent DD retirements
On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 6:28 PM, Anthony Towns wrote:
> - there are "archive networks" for most programming languages these days:
> CPAN, CRAN, Hackage, PyPI, RubyGems, NPM, CCAN, etc. Installing
> software from these sources is often necessary for Debian users, but
> doesn't mesh well with packaged software (unlss you're a DD and can
> package it yourself). Since it's all free software, I don't really
> see why Debian doesn't have a set of automatic tools to repackage
> all that software, so it's all just an "apt-get" away.
We do: dh-make-perl, npm2deb, gem2deb, stdeb, cabal-debian etc which
are intended to be wrapped by debdry to eliminate much of the initial
packaging process.
> - perhaps it's all been fixed since I last looked, but "web apps" still
> don't seem to be a "solved problem" to me. If you install, say,
> libreoffice, you run apt-get (or whatever), then you run libreoffice,
> and you're done. But if you want to install wordpress, you have a whole
> bunch of additional steps to go through [1].
We have a web app policy but it is fairly abandoned.
The wordpress wiki page seems to miss the wp-setup script that is in
the package now.
There are some external projects in this space, like sandstorm and juju.
> - application isolation is a popular issue now, often solved by blatting
> whole OS images around (VMs, docker, ...). That brings up a whole host
> of packaging issues (how do you create the image, how do you keep it up
> to date, how do you distribute the image)
systemd has some great isolation features that use the same Linux
kernel APIs as docker/etc.
The GNOME folks are working on application isolation for the desktop:
http://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2015/01/21/sandboxed-applications-for-gnome/
> And, of course, I run Linux systems that aren't Debian these days --
> I have both a phone and a tablet.
The lifecycle for these sort of devices is too short for the Free
Software world to realistically support them in a sane way before they
become obsolete. There are also few people with the time, skills and
motivation to do so. Even the ancient N900 still doesn't have full
support in mainline Linux yet. I think the best we can do here is the
chroot on Android tools.
http://elinux.org/N900
https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile
https://wiki.debian.org/ChrootOnAndroid
There is also a lot of software from the Android ecosystem that would
be interesting to have ported to Debian, all of f-droid for example.
https://f-droid.org/
> Why aren't those people doing things in Debian? I claim two reasons:
> 1) because they can make (more/any) money doing it elsewhere; and 2)
> because Debian folks are more interested in the solved problems of the
> 90s than the problems of today.
It is also much more work to do things the Debian way.
--
bye,
pabs
https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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