Package: wnpp Severity: wishlist * Package name : grafana Version : 6.0.1 Upstream Author : cont...@grafana.org * URL : https://grafana.com/ * License : Apache-2 Programming Lang: Golang, Javascript Description : feature rich metrics dashboard and graph editor
Grafana is a feature rich metrics dashboard and graph editor for Prometheus, Graphite, InfluxDB & OpenTSDB. ---- Grafana was once packaged in Debian under the good eyes of Dmitry Smirnov (in CC). It was orphaned then removed from Debian last September (#909592). I was hoping the upstream package might give us a good base to start with but a review from Guillem Jover showed that the upstream package was inadequate (#835210), namely: > - Appears to have been "packaged" with fpm… > - The automatically generated metadata is rather poor, probably > just incorrect. <https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm/issues/409> > - Installs the systemd service file under /usr/lib instead of /lib, > which would break deb-systemd-helper (#887456), which it does not > use anyway. > - Does not enable the systemd service nor the init script. > - Marks said systemd service file under /usr/lib as a conffile. > - Changes pathname owners and permissions w/o checking first with > dpkg-statoverrides. > - Uses grafana as a user, which can easily clash with user names. > That should be _grafana. > - Installs configuration files manually, that it then does not > cleanup on purge. > - Ships unstripped executables. > - Embeds a metric ton of javascript modules. > - Possibly more… I think it's fair that the package was removed, but I still think it would be important to package Grafana in Debian. It's a very interesting project, from a user's perspective: it generates beautiful graphs and performs very well. It is, in my opinion, likely to become a standard in monitoring/trending/graphing tools out there, along with Prometheus and other similar tools. The fact that it does nasty stuff with Debian packaging could be fixed. The too many embeded Javascript dependencies is harder, but we've crossed that bridge for other packages and I don't quite see why Grafana should be any different. If anything, those concerns should at least be taken upstream at some point. Because of the overlap, I'm not sure if that should be under the umbrella of the Javascript or Golang teams. Right now I'm using it as a Docker container, because I didn't trust the upstream package to do the right thing, and I'd like to get rid of that anomaly. Thanks!