[Owncloud] Getting owncloud-client in Debian

[Daniel Molkentin]

On 29.10.2012, at 20:05, MJ Ray wrote:

> Klaas Freitag <freitag at owncloud.com>
>> On 29.10.2012 13:42, MJ Ray wrote:
>> 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
> 

This does not prevent us to fix them in OBS, does it?

> 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.
> 

Having a "stable" client is not a benefit at all: It has no negotiation protocol yet, so if the server implementation
changes too much, the client will produce fancy bugs (or we will need to black-list those clients from the server side to prevent havoc). Either way, it will not work, and it will have to deal with issue reports of bugs long solved in up to date versions..This is something we plan to mitigate, but until this happens, I am not willing to support something that people use fore 3+ years without upgrading, and even after that, it's doubtful that a product with a release-cycle with a pace as fast as ownClouds be a good fit for Distro repositories.

In my previous job we had the same problem with early versions of Qt Creator. People would be sending us bugs with Qt Creator 1.x, when we were already three years into 2.x development. And Qt Creator is not a particularly security-sensitive product, unlike ownCloud. If the Debian folks feel like backporting security fixes to a substantially different code base: Fine, it's their fetish, not mine.

> 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)

It requires JS for a good reason: It's part of a web app. Btw: Launchpad also requires JS for the Ubuntu PPA pages. Big deal. It's 2012.

> 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.
> 

OBS should offer ready-made <repo-name>.list files, just like it already offers .repo files for openSUSE and Fedora. We can talk to the OBS guys about that and/or do something ourselves (no brainer with more people on the team, *hint*).

> 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.
> 

I am not following. OBS puts its binaries to download.opensuse.org, which is one of the best mirrored-servers out there (and thanks to mirrorbrain, is mirrored implicitly by default). That said, OBS is usually very reliable. And of course there are no mirrors; it's a web service/application rather than a static web page, and all you can do is improve reliability. But since the packages it produces are fully mirrored, that's hardly a deal-breaker.

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


Frankly no, it doesn't. I don't use OBS because it's been built/run/hosted by SUSE, but because it solves a problem. And for that, I am rather grateful.

Cheers,
  Daniel

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