[Owncloud] Getting owncloud-client in Debian

[MJ Ray]

Klaas Freitag <freitag at owncloud.com>
> On 29.10.2012 13:42, MJ Ray wrote:
> > Jean-Louis Dupond <jean-louis at dupond.be>
> >> Wouldn't it be a good idea to get the ownCloud Client packages in
> >> Debian repositories? [...]
> >
> > Yes.
> Why btw?
> 
> The idea of doing it in the buildservice is to provide the users with 
> the latest versions quickly after release, which is important to users 
> especially of Ubuntu and friends. We get that feedback regularly.
> 
> If the package on OBS are not ok, we're eager to hear why and to get 
> patches to improve that.

The packages on OBS fall down two ways:

Firstly, they don't follow debian-policy and contain other things which
are arguably bugs.  The fixes are available linked from
http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud
at 
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-owncloud/owncloud.git;a=tree;f=debian/patches;hb=HEAD

Secondly, each repository is another thing to enable on each client
system.  Here, I disagree slightly with others: I feel the client is
more important to keep stable and get in more distributions, because
server sysadmins will be more comfortable adding third-party software
sources.  I feel that the clients are aimed at a wider audience.

OBS itself falls down in three ways:

The instructions (at
http://software.opensuse.org/download/package?project=isv:ownCloud:community&package=owncloud-client
which requires javascript for no good reason) are not best practice,
because they modify sources.list.  It should say to add a file in the
sources.list.d folder, to avoid needless conflicts during upgrades.

Last week, OBS itself seemed to go down for a few minutes when I was
trying to use it and a web search didn't find mirrors.

And it just feels a bit strange putting an opensuse address into a
debian package manager, doesn't it? ;-)

Hope that informs,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/