[Pkg-erlang-devel] CouchDB packaging updates

[Sam Bisbee]

Hey Elliot, thanks for getting the ball rolling.

On Mon, Nov 09, 2009 at 01:43:34AM -0500, Elliot Murphy wrote:
[snip]
> The biggest change I plan to commit tomorrow is splitting couchdb into
> two packages, couchdb and couchdb-bin. This change is in order to allow
> people to install and use CouchDB on a per-user basis without requiring
> a systemwide couchdb instance to be installed (by installing
> couchdb-bin). The init script and related bits are left in the couchdb
> package, so that any package that already had Depends: couchdb doesn't
> get any surprises or behavior changes. Any feedback on this change is
> welcome; we successfully shipped it in Ubuntu but I want to be sure it's
> done the correct way for debian and I don't accidentally introduce some
> Ubuntu-specific thing.

For the local user install option, would it still have the ability to serve to
the network devices? If yes, then this feels weird to me. If no, this still
seems a bit odd as it breaks the paradigm that most all database systems are
using right now: one or more installs as system wide applications that
subsequent applications pull from.

I know that couchdb is trying to be the ambiguous data collection system for
any scenario, but I think that can be achieved with the more standard paradigm.
Doing the per-user thing in a system wide install will be a lot easier as
authentication features are built out.

> Also, I've updated http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/ErlangPackagingTeam so
> that it now has correct pointers to the mailing list, project web site,
> and svn repo. I also added my name.
> 
> Sam, Gera, Jim: I'd love to find some way for us to collaborate on the
> CouchDB package. Here's a short list of the changes I'd like to figure
> out how to do at some point, maybe you have additional ideas:

I would like to see the todo list for the package cleared out
(http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/couchdb.html). Looks like it's some easy
stuff.

> - make a test suite run during package build. i've been burned already
> once by building couchdb with the wrong path to the javascript
> libraries, and it built and started fine, but as soon as the Futon tests
> were run it crashed. It would be so much safer to have some unit tests
> run during build.

+1 This would be a huge win. Most of the install help that I see people asking
for seems to surround path issues [on Debian based distros]. 

> - figure out what the story is with Mozilla and libmozjs vs. xulrunner.
> In Ubuntu, libmozjs has been removed as a package, and libmozjs.so ships
> as part of the xulrunner package. I don't know the whole story there,
> and what the plans are for Debian.

No idea, but we should probably reach out to those packages' maintainers

[snip]
> Also, I saw a blog entry on planet debian recently complaining about
> ubuntu.com email addresses in debian uploads - should I use my gmail.com
> or canonical.com email address instead?

Eh, I don't care either way. I find a lot of that type of stuff to be cruft.

> Sorry for being quiet for so long, I was incredibly busy for a while
> with the Ubuntu 9.10 release, and now I'm excited to start getting
> involved in debian and focus more efforts here, where work can benefit
> more people.

No worries, I was busy on a consulting gig that ended last week. Looks like
I'll have some more time now though, as I managed to get a working Testing
release of Debian up on Virtual Box and made a first attempt at packaging
0.10.0. I'll try pulling your and Sergei's changes to see if anything else
breaks for me. ;-) 

Thanks,

p.s. I'm ravidgemole on IRC.

-- 
Sam Bisbee