[pkg-golang-devel] Bug#923872: RFP: grafana -- feature rich metrics dashboard and graph editor

[Antoine Beaupre]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist

* Package name    : grafana
  Version         : 6.0.1
  Upstream Author : contact at grafana.org
* URL             : https://grafana.com/
* License         : Apache-2
  Programming Lang: Golang, Javascript
  Description     : feature rich metrics dashboard and graph editor

Grafana is a feature rich metrics dashboard and graph editor for
Prometheus, Graphite, InfluxDB & OpenTSDB.

----

Grafana was once packaged in Debian under the good eyes of Dmitry
Smirnov (in CC). It was orphaned then removed from Debian last
September (#909592). I was hoping the upstream package might give us a
good base to start with but a review from Guillem Jover showed that
the upstream package was inadequate (#835210), namely:

>  - Appears to have been "packaged" with fpm…
>  - The automatically generated metadata is rather poor, probably
>    just incorrect. <https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm/issues/409>
>  - Installs the systemd service file under /usr/lib instead of /lib,
>    which would break deb-systemd-helper (#887456), which it does not
>    use anyway.
>  - Does not enable the systemd service nor the init script.
>  - Marks said systemd service file under /usr/lib as a conffile.
>  - Changes pathname owners and permissions w/o checking first with
>    dpkg-statoverrides.
>  - Uses grafana as a user, which can easily clash with user names.
>    That should be _grafana.
>  - Installs configuration files manually, that it then does not
>    cleanup on purge.
>  - Ships unstripped executables.
>  - Embeds a metric ton of javascript modules.
>  - Possibly more…

I think it's fair that the package was removed, but I still think it
would be important to package Grafana in Debian.

It's a very interesting project, from a user's perspective: it
generates beautiful graphs and performs very well. It is, in my
opinion, likely to become a standard in monitoring/trending/graphing
tools out there, along with Prometheus and other similar tools.

The fact that it does nasty stuff with Debian packaging could be
fixed. The too many embeded Javascript dependencies is harder, but
we've crossed that bridge for other packages and I don't quite see why
Grafana should be any different. If anything, those concerns should at
least be taken upstream at some point.

Because of the overlap, I'm not sure if that should be under the
umbrella of the Javascript or Golang teams. Right now I'm using it
as a Docker container, because I didn't trust the upstream package to
do the right thing, and I'd like to get rid of that anomaly.

Thanks!