Let's work together!

[Alexis Sukrieh]

Hi,

I'm glad to announce that the Debian Webapps Team is now responsible of
two packages (tinymce and bugzilla) and I hope the team will handle more
and more packages in the future.

That team was born some months ago in order to coordinate the writing of
a Debian Webapps Policy. We had recently the idea to start using the
team infrastructure for handling webapps packages, and we did it.

The packages handled by the team are hosted in our SVN repository and is
accessible there:

svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/srv/svn.debian.org/svn/webapps-common/packages

Commits are tracked via <webapps-common-***@lists.alioth.debian.org>
and packages maintenance are handeled with
<webapps-common-***@lists.debian.org>.

That team needs help, so if you're interested in giving a hand, feel
free to join!

You can reach us either on that mailing-list, or with our IRC chan:
#debian-webapps on irc.debian.org.

Best regards,
--
Alexis Sukrieh <***@sukria.net>
0x1EE5DD34
Debian http://www.debian.org
Backup Manager http://www.backup-manager.org

[Romain Beauxis]

Hi !

Post by Alexis Sukrieh
That team needs help, so if you're interested in giving a hand, feel
free to join!

As a member of the mediawiki packagin team, I feel interested about this!

For mediawiki, we are about to produce a package helping admin setting up
multisite installation when the original software was not designed for it...

Quickly, this is a perl script using fuse that allow mounting a mixed loopback
filesystem where static files are differenciated for customizable files.
Then, customizable files go to a given place, and you get a new mountpoint
where you can point your webserver to, to get the new webapp.
The cool part being that static files are updated when the main package is
updated, and that all of this depends on standards system calls, so it feets
any situation..
You can grab a test package there:
http://www.rastageeks.org/~toots/mediawiki/selective-loopback_0.1_all.deb

I would like to know if you have a policy for multi-site installation, this
would be helpfull to get this to work correctly.


Romain

[sean finney]

hi romain,

Post by Romain Beauxis
For mediawiki, we are about to produce a package helping admin setting up
multisite installation when the original software was not designed for it...

i don't know a lot about mediawiki, so i don't know the background about
why mediawiki would have trouble in a multi-instance installation.

Post by Romain Beauxis
Quickly, this is a perl script using fuse that allow mounting a mixed loopback
filesystem where static files are differenciated for customizable files.
Then, customizable files go to a given place, and you get a new mountpoint
where you can point your webserver to, to get the new webapp.
The cool part being that static files are updated when the main package is
updated, and that all of this depends on standards system calls, so it feets
any situation..

to be honest this sounds a little over-engineered. is there any reason
you couldn't have something like:

<?php
switch("$INSTANCE_NAME"){
"host1.com":
//settings
break;
"host2.com/foobar/wiki":
//different settings
break;
default:
//maybe default settings go here
break;
}
?>

excuse my pseudo-php :)

Post by Romain Beauxis
I would like to know if you have a policy for multi-site installation, this
would be helpfull to get this to work correctly.

in our draft we don't really directly say things have to be a certain
way, because it's not very practical to require this given the wide
variety of applications, for some of which this being much more
difficult than others.

*however*, i have done a considerable amount of work on a (currently
unreleased but available in svn) automagic webapp configurator package
with problems such as multi-site configuration taken into mind, and i
wouldn't mind sharing my experiences if you're interested.


sean

[Romain Beauxis]

Post by sean finney
hi romain,

Hi !

Post by sean finney

Post by Romain Beauxis
For mediawiki, we are about to produce a package helping admin setting up
multisite installation when the original software was not designed for it...

i don't know a lot about mediawiki, so i don't know the background about
why mediawiki would have trouble in a multi-instance  installation.

[...]

Post by sean finney
to be honest this sounds a little over-engineered.  is there any reason
excuse my pseudo-php :)

Yes, anything involving patching the application should work.
However, patching has several drawbacks that makes it very tuff to handle, at
least up to my experience:
* Patches have to be applied for each new release, and for a major release,
this can be a real pain.
* It may introduce security issues
* Such patches then make the installation distribution dependant.
* They involve some action by the admin to create each new instance of the
application.

On the other hand, it is true that it sounds over-engineered, but, to the cost
of this -- allready done BTW :) -- we get that:
* We have multisite using exactly the original code for instalation
* This can be used by each user without the need of an admin
* Each of the multisite files get updated with every main update, which can
also save a lot of time..

Now I agree that a solution using fuse cannot be a general solution, but I
think this one has some good properties though..


Romain