Package Diaspora for Linux distributions.
proposal by Sean Tilley Closed Sat 1 Sep 2012 11:57PM
One thing that would definitely help with some of Diaspora's installation issues is to set up a PPA on LaunchPad, and package up Diaspora stable releases (see Release Cycle proposal).
With some help from some volunteers from the Ubuntu community, we could get it accepted into the Ubuntu universe repo, and Diaspora would be as easy to install as "sudo apt-get install diaspora". Some ncurses installer would run for initial setup of config variables, and we could include a daemon that starts up the Diaspora instance upon booting the system.
Turning it on manually could be done as an Upstart job, with the podmin simply typing "diaspora start" or "diaspora stop".
By packaging up for distributions, we can get better exposure to different communities that might otherwise not know about us. We could make setting up a Diaspora server stupidly easy for *nix users.
Results
| Results | Option | Votes | % of votes cast | % of eligible voters | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agree | 4 | 100 | 8 |    | |
| Abstain | 0 | 0 | 0 | ||
| Disagree | 0 | 0 | 0 | ||
| Block | 0 | 0 | 0 | ||
| Undecided | 48 | 92 |             |
4 of 52 votes cast (7% participation)
Jason Robinson
Sat 1 Sep 2012 8:00PM
This would be great, any and all Linux distributions :) If I have time I would gladly participate in the Launchpad PPA for Ubuntu
FlaburganSat 1 Sep 2012 9:29PM
We DEFINITLY need to do that. But we have to wait a more stable version.
Jonne HaßSat 1 Sep 2012 3:21PM
I got a PKGBUILD (package for Archlinux) which should still work altough I haven't tried for some time: https://gist.github.com/1647460
Sean TilleySat 1 Sep 2012 3:52PM
Thanks, Jonne!
Sean TilleySat 1 Sep 2012 9:30PM
Thanks, Jason! I think ideally, once we get some cleanup with D*, we should definitely think about starting up a PPA. Talk to Hans, he's been working on some init scripts for starting up a Diaspora instance when a server starts up.
Florian StaudacherSun 2 Sep 2012 12:37AM
this is kinda hard, as ruby, rails and our other gems should have exactly the version specified, which is not necessarily the version available from a distros package management ...
Jeremy HuffmanSun 2 Sep 2012 1:01AM
The state of ruby support in the mainline debian distros is quite a disaster frankly. Ubuntu dropped Ruby 1.9.3 support in 11.04 due to some significant issues in how things were being packaged. Going forward they will be packaging gems consistently with gem2deb. If you want to learn more about this or are really interested in helping improve the state of Ruby in Debian (and Ubuntu, Mint, et. al) this is a link to team that's putting this together: http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Ruby/Packaging
A possibly ideal future state could have a Diaspora package that did nothing but specify all the version dependencies for all of its gems, so that when you sudo apt-get install diaspora, you get everything you need (including git, and a script to fetch the stable branch).
Jason RobinsonMon 3 Sep 2012 7:48AM
Everything in life is hard. For D* pods to really pop up everywhere it needs to install easily. On Linux this should be through the package management system.
Hard yes, impossible not, long term future - yes please.
Devendra Mahra ·Sat 1 Sep 2012 6:15AM
Will it be benefitial to have vm images, amazon AMI, and bitnami stack also for diaspora along with linux package