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

[James Westby]

Hi,

To try and learn something from the other extreme, may I ask "what would
be lost if charms didn't use packages at all?"

Obviously those who weren't using juju wouldn't benefit at all from the
charm, but what else is there?

Having an answer to this question may help understand where to draw the
line, but it will also help encourage people to get things packaged when
there would be some benefit to doing so.

Thanks,

James

On Wed, 15 Feb 2012 15:06:22 -0500, "Jorge O. Castro" <jorge at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> This subject will likely lead to a bunch of opinions but I'd like to
> come to some consensus so we can have a default recommended best
> practice. We've talked about this at UDS and throughout the cycle, but
> we've got some experience now and I'd like to revisit this again.
> Right now we like charms that install things from the archive. In fact
> to become an "officially blessed" charm this is something we require.
> 
> However, getting things packaged in Debian/Ubuntu for some upstream
> projects can be a monumental task. I can personally think of many
> upstreams where this is a large barrier. Fortunately, with a juju
> charm we can totally cheat and get around this pulling a tarball or
> right from VCS and deploying that way. Worst case instead of "juju
> deploy jorgesoft" I can do "juju deploy
> cs:~jorgesoft/oneiric/jorgesoft".
> 
> 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.
> - 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.
> - 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.
> 
> 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?
> 
> -- 
> Jorge Castro
> Canonical Ltd.
> http://cloud.ubuntu.com
> 
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