When should we ask charmers to put things in the archive instead of winging it?

[Robbie Williamson]

On 02/15/2012 02:06 PM, Jorge O. Castro wrote:
[snip]
> 
> Keeping in mind that the ability to remove deployment barriers (like
> lack of packages) is a strength of juju my proposal would be this:
> 
> - If by writing a charm this enables users to use your software in a
> way that lets them inspect and contribute to your charm then yeah,
> have your charm deploy your pristine upstream source. It gets it out
> there.
+1

> - Medium to long term though, you'll want to be in the archive so you
> can inherit the benefits, at some point you'll switch your charm to
> just using the packages and (theoretically) the users wouldn't really
> notice/care.
I think this depends on the upstream, in terms of its development model
and how fast it releases. I definitely think users should know up front
where the binaries are coming from and notified when that changes.

> - Some charms have switches that let you default to packages, but
> install from upstream if you want. I think we should not only
> encourage this, but promote it. At some point someone somewhere is
> going to want to do this anyway so by promoting having that feature in
> the charm it would at least have them in the store where they can be
> improved on by the community.
+100 I like this approach the best.  It provide more flexibility in
deployment and makes it easier for someone to check for a bug fix in the
upstream without switching charms

> 
> Currently we default to the stricter view that we want things in the
> archive and that charms pulling from a VCS or a PPA or whatever are
> sort of fine, but not ideal. We've had discussions about this for a
> while now but from talking to projects I am starting to come to
> believe that we should consider it okay if a project wants to just
> install from it's pristine source if they're willing to absolve our
> security and server teams of the responsibility. (I realize that last
> part is tricky.)
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
Again, I think as long as users know where their binaries are coming
from, we should let charmers choose.  Perhaps this is how we breakout
the charm collection.  Instead of Main, Universe, Restricted, etc, we
have Ubuntu, PPA, and Upstream...or something like that.

-Robbie


-- 
Robbie Williamson <robbie at ubuntu.com>
robbiew[irc.freenode.net]

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