[debian-lan-devel] Debian development and release: always releasable (essay)

[Andreas B. Mundt]

Hi all,

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 02:14:17PM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 03:10:07PM +0200, Holger Levsen wrote:
> > On Samstag, 25. Mai 2013, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> > > Actually, I believe there is.  The Debian Edu blend contain the
> > > education-main-server task and metapackage, which include a Kerberos
> > > KDC.  It also contain the LDAP server as KDC backend storage and
> > > user/group/etc lookup.
> >
> > there is also the Debian-LAN which is described as "The goal of Debian-LAN is
> > to make setting up a local network with centralized user and machine
> > management, intranet, etc. as easy as possible in Debian."
> >
> > see ://lists.debian.org/20120408083121.GB9680 at flashgordon
>
> If I where Andreas Mundt I would try to do this inside the Debian
> Enterprise effort.  While there is barely any traffic on this list you
> just need to start with such an effort somehow and IMHO the topic does
> fit.

First, many thanks to Holger for mentioning the Debian-LAN project
here and thereby pointing me to the ongoing discussion. I try to
follow -devel as time permits, but I'm not subscribed, please keep me
in cc.

@Andreas:  I announced Debian-LAN on several lists, including
debian-enterprice [1], and debian-news mentioned it too [2].  It's
planned to send another announcement message as soon as the latest
additions to the debian-lan-config package are well tested and
uploaded to wheezy-backports.  A DebConf talk is under way.  In other
words:  Anybody is invited to make use of and/or contribute to the
Debian-LAN project.  I would be rather astonished if there are already
efforts in Debian Enterprise currently working on the same issue.  If
this is the case, we should of course not do the work twice.

But back to the topic.  I appreciate the ideas outlined by Lars and
Russ very much, and I would love to see debian-lan helping to make
them reality.

The Debian-LAN system provides a basic Debian Desktop installation in
combination with a full-featured server providing a Kerberos KDC with
kerberized services: ssh, NFSv4, apache, LDAP, exim, dovecot, ...

FAI provides a very structured and extremely flexible way to compose
the system. For any service (== FAI class), the implementation is
straight forward: Packages, preseedings, and if unavoidable extra
files and/or 'manual' configuration tweaks.  All this in combination
with the thorough logging included in FAI proved to be a valuable
concept:  It's almost always clear what's gone wrong and causes
problems.

Since I started to work on the Debian-LAN project at DebConf11, it
turned out with every implementation of a new service/feature that
using FAI is a very good approach.

I am not familiar with jenkins, but I cannot imagine a problem running
automatic test as Holger already does with a slightly adapted
Debian-LAN system.  The goal of Debian-LAN is to provide a Debian
local area network out-of-the box, this covers exactly all relevant
tests that a stable Debian should pass.

If Debian-LAN can be part of such automatic testing it would be really
great!

Best regards,

     Andi



[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-enterprise/2012/04/msg00000.html
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-news/2012/msg00015.html