[362] in athena10
Re: Adding software "to the release"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Mon Aug 4 18:48:31 2008
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@mit.edu>
Cc: athena10@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <AFE7CAC0-731B-4712-A99B-B932EB92B319@mit.edu>
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Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:28:47 -0400
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On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 10:20 -0400, Jonathan Reed wrote:
> So, Alex and I have been talking a bit about how the way we deal with
> 3partysw (particularly GPL'd packages) is likely to change in Athena
> 10. My understand at the moment is that lockers we previously copied
> locally (Acrobat, Ooffice) will have their equivalent packages
> installed from universe by debathena-workstation (and possibly -
> standard).
The metapackage for this is called debathena-cluster-software. It is
not part of debathena-workstation because it is *huge* (particularly
texlive-full) and I want it possible to have Athena workstation behavior
without the full software set. But it will be depended on by
debathena-cluster and it's offered by the Athena 10 installer as an
addon to the locker/standard/workstation main component.
(Acrobat will not be part of debathena-cluster-software because there is
no Debian package for it, since it's not free software. But evince, the
Ubuntu default PDF viewer, is good enough to replace the core
functionality of viewing and printing PDF files. The locker can still
be used for corner cases.)
> I'm still coming up to speed on how Debian handles packaging and
> requirements, so my question at this point is: how easy or hard is it
> to decide that a new piece of software should be installed as part of
> "Athena"? That is, how much lead time is required, and how would
> machines receive the new package?
>From a technical perspective, we just have to added to the equivs file
for the cluster-software metapackage and then build and upload the
package. For the fall preview release, there will be no "patch testing
period" like there is for Athena 9.4, so machines will get the new
software as soon as they take an update.
>From a policy perspective, the software should:
(1) Have a package maintained well enough that it doesn't interfere
with the environment. (For instance, by expecting interactive input
when it installs or upgrades.)
(2) Be useful enough to justify the disk space it takes up. A 250K
package doesn't need to be very useful, but I turned down seamonkey
because it's too large for the expected userbase.
