[Owncloud] Getting owncloud-client in Debian

[MJ Ray]

Daniel Molkentin <danimo at owncloud.com>
> On 29.10.2012, at 20:05, MJ Ray wrote:
> > 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?

Nope!  It would be great to see them fixed in owncloud source, indeed.

The question was "If the package on OBS are not ok, we're eager to
hear why and to get patches to improve that" so I was giving some
reasons and some patches.

One other thing: there's an incorrect dependency on php5-iconv which
doesn't exist, reported in http://forum.owncloud.org/viewtopic.php?p=10982

Would it be possible to remove php5-iconv from debian/control and build a
4.5.1-2 packaging update?

(I tried but I didn't spot debian/control in the repository at github,
it's not in the control file at pkg-owncloud/owncloud.git and I don't
understand where it might be from
http://openbuildservice.org/help/manuals/obs-reference-guide/ )

> > 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 [...] This is
> something we plan to mitigate, but until this happens, [...]

Well, yes, a stable client is only a benefit once stability brings
benefits, but I outlined why I feel distribution of stable clients is
an important goal because we were asked.

[...]
> > 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.

Yeah, it's 2012 and powering clients is more expensive than ever,
while data transfer's not getting cheaper as quick.

The page served up is HTML page pretending to be a web app, revealing
different elements based on the click - the JS doesn't do any clever
work to reduce the download size and it could display the whole thing
to non-JS browsers (progressive enhancement theory).  I suspect it
could do it with CSS alone, rather than run a script.

I don't like Launchpad either, for various reasons.

> > 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*).

Cool.  As no-one seems to see why it doesn't, I'd mentioned using
projectname.list files to the Feedback address on the page.

The hint's too subtle for me.  I didn't find the source code for the
package page and surely owncloud people could already write the
instructions into http://owncloud.org/support/install/ but I can't?

> > 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 [...]

Oh well, let's suspect a DNS problem.  I didn't see the OBS bit
(rather than the opensuse distribution) on ones like mirror.ox.ac.uk
but maybe I just didn't think of the right mirror server.

> > 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.

SMILE!  :-)))  THAT ONE WAS A JOKE.  Sheesh...

Regards,
-- 
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/