[Freedombox-discuss] Owncloud, Piwigo, Gogs, Matrix, ...

[Stefan Monnier]

> Well, I see no other way to run code that is unmaintainable by Debian,
> than either a) have someone else maintain it or b) run it unmaintained.

That's right.  But I also wonder what people choose in practice.
I guess it falls between:
- don't use it.
- install it once by hand, then leave it to rot.
- use the developer-provided .deb (when available).
- use someone else's server.

> Some upstream projects offer .deb packages - if you trust them to handle
> the task Debian would otherwise do then great for you.

I'm uncomfortable doing that, especially when I end up having to do it
with several packages, so my sources.list ends up much too large to my
taste.

> Personally I most of the time choose to *not* run services that Debian
> cannot maintain, because I find the task Debian does real and not
> replaceable by upstreams or myself.

That's also usually my choice.  But there's got to be a better solution.

Basically, I'm thinking that we could have a half-way between Debian and
hand-maintenance: have a "sub-Debian" repository with packages that
aren't well packaged (hence not acceptable for Debian), but that are
regularly updated.  I'd expect this repository would contain packages
that closely follow the packaging style of the upstream developer.
I guess it could be called "ugly" or "messy", and handled a bit like
"experimental".

So I'd have to live with each package's idiosyncrasies and lack of
integration with the rest of Debian, just like when I install by hand,
but at least the procedure to update those packages would be
standardized and I wouldn't have to follow umpteen mailing lists or RSS
thingies to notice when a package needs to be updated.

I guess not all packages that could fit in there would fall in the
category of "private servers", but I think many of the packages I'd like
to see supported by FreedomBox could fit in such a repository.

So, maybe such a repository wouldn't be exclusive to FreedomBox, but
I think FreedomBox could be a good place to start such a repository.

WDYT?


        Stefan