[pkg-go] Bug#894131: Bug#894131: prometheus-alertmanager: New upstream release 0.14.0 available. Please package and backport to stretch.

[Daniel Swarbrick]

Martin,

The Alertmanager UI requires Elm 0.18 (as specified in its 
elm-package.json). Over at 
https://github.com/elm-lang/elm-platform#1-get-haskell-working, they 
state that Elm <= 0.16 should build with GHC 7.8. I take this to mean 
that later versions of Elm require a later version of GHC, and indeed 
they mention that their developers mostly use GHC 7.10.

Debian currently has Haskell Platform 2014.2.0.0 (GHC 7.8.3), so to 
build the version of Elm used by Alertmanager, Debian would most likely 
first have to update their Haskell. And so it continues...

I think you idea of stripping away the UI and replacing it with 
something non-standard is not a good idea, because Debian will become 
known as "that distro" which has non-standard Prometheus packages. 
People will either use a different distro, or run it in Docker, or 
something else - in any case, your work will have been for nothing.

What exactly in Debian policy is preventing us shipping Alertmanager 
built as intended by upstream?

Would it be an option to _decompress_ the gzipped & hex-encoded blobs 
from Alertmanager's ui/bindata.go back to their sources and package 
those? Looking at the file, that would produce these files:

// Code generated by go-bindata.
// sources:
// ui/app/script.js
// ui/app/index.html
// ui/app/favicon.ico
// ui/app/lib/bootstrap-4.0.0-alpha.6-dist/css/bootstrap.min.css
// ui/app/lib/bootstrap-4.0.0-alpha.6-dist/css/bootstrap.min.css.map
// ui/app/lib/font-awesome-4.7.0/css/font-awesome.css
// ui/app/lib/font-awesome-4.7.0/css/font-awesome.min.css
// ui/app/lib/font-awesome-4.7.0/fonts/FontAwesome.otf
// ui/app/lib/font-awesome-4.7.0/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.eot
// ui/app/lib/font-awesome-4.7.0/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.svg
// ui/app/lib/font-awesome-4.7.0/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.ttf
// ui/app/lib/font-awesome-4.7.0/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.woff
// ui/app/lib/font-awesome-4.7.0/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.woff2

Best,
Daniel