On Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 04:11:29PM +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote: > 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. > > Dolibarr is not alone: > There was/is a similar issue with ownCloud/nextCloud.
I would love to see something that allows for these complex packages (package ecosystems, really) to play nice with stock Debian. I am always hesitant to use unofficial upstream .deb packages unless I know that they have experienced Debian Developers involved in the packaging. There have been too many instances for me where such packages are of poor quality and end up causing more problems than they solve. My preferred method for applications like this is to install manually from tarballs and just ignore the unofficial .deb packages. Sadly, that is nearly always more work. The container approach is very interesting since many of the most complex packages would benefit greatly from being kept separate from the rest of the system for a multitude of reasons. Certainly security is one and dependency management is another (e.g., as in the Dolibarr example, where upstream only tests against certain versions of the dependencies which may not be available directly in Debian). Anyhow, these are just my thoughts. I would love to see some effort form around your proposal and would definitely get involved, time permitting. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sánchez
