[Freedombox-discuss] don't write code - user-friendly configuration

[paxcoder]

On 09/01/2010 01:07 PM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> It is a *much* slower process to convince a Debian package maintainer 
> to implement reliable packaging configurability for our needs than to 
> hack ourselves on top of an installed package, but all hacks we invent 
> we must *maintain* too, which is too likely to bit-rot down the road. 

That's a tough one. I think it'll take too way much time and hassle for 
our config changes to reach FB users. I also doubt maintainers would be 
willing to have alternative configs in their packages that they'd need 
to maintain, basically treating FB as an arch against which they would 
be required to test on. I think we must write our own patches and 
maintain them, in the end, that's part of our job. Of course, if it's 
something that can be merged into the official package, that's the way 
to go. But I'm talking about things that cannot, things specific to our 
project (like eg. Apache config to be able to run GNU social out of the 
box). So I'd talk about scenarios where we do write and maintain our 
code for our specific needs. One could imagine a maintainer accepting 
one FB dev as a co-maintiainer and waiting for his patches before 
releasing their package, but that's unlikely to happen. So if we have to 
write code ourselves, we could just have our own set of diff patches 
that are applied to official config files (eg. freedombox-configs 
package). However, therein lies another problem also: FB users obviously 
cannot update to new versions of packages, before we correct the 
configs, which not only delays the package inflow, but also requires a 
mechanism which would do that. I think we'd all agree having a repo of 
our own is a "bad thing", but what else is there? Then again, maybe they 
would maintain for the Freedom Box if we can get them interested. I 
don't know.

--Luka Marc(etic'
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/attachments/20100901/37aeaf2a/attachment.htm>