Re: What can Debian do to provide complex applications to its users?

[Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@debian.org>]

Raphael Hertzog dijo [Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 04:11:29PM +0100]:
> Hello everybody,
> 
> the fact that I had to request the removal of dolibarr from Debian makes
> me sad (see below for the reasons) and I believe that we should be able
> to do better to provide complex applications to our end users.
> (...)
> I'm sure we are missing lots of good applications due to our requirements.
> What can we do to avoid this?
> 
> I don't have any definite answers although there are ideas to explore:
> (...)
> What do you think? Do you have other ideas? Are there other persons
> who are annoyed by the current situation?

I was bitten by a similar issue; I maintained Drupal 7 for several
years (was included in 3 stable releases). But I gave up when
packaging Drupal 8, much for the same reasons:

   http://gwolf.org/node/4087

However it saddens me, that's... Well, the right thing to do, IMO.

> - we could relax our requirements and have a way to document the
>   limitations of those packages (wrt our usual policies)
> 
> - we could ship those applications not as .deb but as container
>   and let them have their own lifecycle

I would not like us relaxing our requirements. If there is a need to
distribute webapps as container images, that can be done, and much
probably it can be done by ourselves - But that's not Debian. That
means, distributing a container with dolibarr or with drupal8 will not
allow us to build packages that depend on them (such as
drupal7-mod-civicrm), or packaging helpers (such as
dh-make-drupal). Maybe few webapps introduce full ecosystems as Drupal
does; we had a similar issue a couple of years ago with OwnCloud, and
it would fall in the same case. And I think examples will be too many
to list.