Re: Web applications specific issues

[Alex Grigorovich <grig@shamrock-games.ru>]

Hi there!

I'm quite new to Debian, but I have some thought on the topic which
might appear useful:

Why not make templates and related static files a separate package with
core package depending on it, and give user a simple way to repackage
their changes.

Say, there is foo-1.2 depending on foo-static-20050505, which is
provided by foo-static-1.2. In order to customize things in foo, user
has to make his own version of foo-static, providing the same interface
and install in in place of original version. If I'm not mistaken, his
package would not get upgraded with foo's own version unless foo bumps
its depends field.

Customization may look like this:

apt-get source foo-static
cd foo-static-$version
<make changes to it>
dh-repackage my-foo-static-1.0
dpkg -i ../my-foo-static-1.0

dh-repackage does roughly the same thing as dpkg-buildpackage only
changing package name first and maybe running some test to ensure
resulting package's comatibility with original version.

There may even be two user-supplied packages providing
foo-static-20050505 for use on different virtualhosts.

Requirement to package user's changes seperately may even be viewed as
an advantage of educating people with debian's packaging system. :)

Regards,

-- 
Alex Grigorovich <grig@shamrock-games.ru>