[Freedombox-discuss] Introducing myself

[Charles N Wyble]

On 4/8/2011 8:01 PM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> On 11-04-08 at 06:02pm, Charles N Wyble wrote:
>> On 4/8/2011 4:40 PM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
>>> I am quite interested in improving Debian packages to be installable
>>> readily usable out of the box.  Experience like yours can potentially
>>> be quite useful there.
> Yes, I did notice that post.  But I found less of an interest in that,
> since my interest is not to "hack on top" of Debian, as I call it, but
> to integrate with Debian.

Ah. Yes. As do I. Hence my desire to create meta packages.

> ...so only your later post made me actually look at that wiki of yours
> and realize the amount of experience you seem to have with actual
> concrete setups.

Excellent. My previous post was quite lengthy, and perhaps should have 
been done on my
blog and linked here. :)

But yes, I have a lot of experience with the applications and feel 
confident recommending them.


> It sure is faster to put together separate SQL-injecting packages
> together than to convince maintainers of underlying packages to extend
> flexibility.

Yes. Very much so. I like the individual applications and they give me 
"best of breed"
functionality for my particular needs. Others are free to choose the 
applications they
feel are best.

>   Then I (and others worried like me that "hacking on top"
> has higher risk of bit-rot) can build from work like yours at a slower
> pace, without stalling first revisions of FreedomBox.

Hmmm. Well how difficult is packaging a LAMP application for debian? 
I've installed
several via apt-get (not for data ownership, but various other 
applications) and it's
always been a pleasant experience. apt-get install app, localhost/app 
just works. Sometimes
have to hunt down default PW in 
/usr/share/doc/<app>/README.(DEBIAN).(gz). Often times
default creds get setup during install process.

Should we move this portion of the discussion to the debian packaging list?

>
>>> How detailed do you have your setups documented?  Did you use Debian
>>> packages, compiled everything yourself, or...?
>> Sure. No debian packages were used. I just grabbed latest upstream. If
>> the install was broken I rejected the package. If it required anything
>> beyond a web based installer I rejected it. Simple is key. I can
>> automate simple and deliver to the masses.
>> The criteria I used in the first elimination rounds seemed solid to me
>> at the time. The authors/maintainers of the software cared enough to
>> ship working installers, so the usage quality of the software received
>> high attention as well.
>> So far I haven't been proven wrong. :)
> Hm, I suspect we talk past each other here: I did not mean if you'd
> _created_ debian-style packages for your own customizations, quite the
> contrary: How far did you use official Debian packages and which custom
> tweaks did you compose and apply on top of that?

I have used 0 debian pacakges for the installs that I currently use. All 
upstream .zip/.tgz files.
I'm actually hosting on a Centos box at the moment ;)

> ...but perhaps simplest is to wait and let you consense some of those
> planned meta-packages of yours and investigate those :-)

Yeah I need to get those done soon. I'm still figuring out how to make 
them work (the backups
and security anyway) but I imagine I'll package up the lamp stuff here 
pretty quick.