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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