[Python-apps-team] Bug#638720: Odoo packaging

[W. Martin Borgert]

Hi Aaron,

Quoting Aaron Bohy <aab at odoo.com>:
> I am part of the Odoo team working on packaging and we are currently working
> on an Odoo 8.0 package for the Debian archive.

Great! Let's work together then :~)

> Here is our work so far: https://mentors.debian.net/package/odoo

Part of my work is here (you saw this probably in the bug report):

http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/odoo.git/

I did already some work on my home git repo, but never pushed,
because it is a little bit messy.

> Many of them are due to the fact that Odoo embeds javascript libraries, and
> those libraries are often minified. However, we prefer to keep those  
> libraries
> in the archive to have a better control of those libraries updates.

OK, I understand, but we have to put some work into it:

1. Everything in Debian must come with source code. AGPL3 defines:

    `The "source code" for a work means the preferred form of the work
    for making modifications to it.`

    Having generated code in git is IMHO not a good idea, even for
    Odoo itself. You should at least put the original sources there
    and run a free JS/CSS compressor in the make process.

    The Debian FTP masters would not accept any compressed JS files,
    not even in the .orig.tar.gz.

2. Debian frowns upon embedded libraries. This means, in some cases
    embedded JS files can be accepted, but we should try to avoid them.

    Esp. when there is already a Debian package, we cannot really justify
    an embedded copy. We can justify it for stuff, that is not in Debian
    anyway, because there is no duplication in Debian. But we need to
    document such libraries, see https://wiki.debian.org/EmbeddedCodeCopies

Of course, this is a lot of work. But I'm confident, that upstream
would benefit from it a lot!

> We also get a warning because we put image files in /usr/lib, but we  
> can't put
> images apart from python code.

This has been discussed on this list. Does anybody remember when?
What was the outcome? I don't remember...

> About the script-with-language-extension, we could replace odoo.py  
> by odoo but
> we prefer not to do so as it could break scripts of people already using the
> deb packages published on http://nightly.odoo.com/, especially  
> because v8.0 is
> the stable version of Odoo (released in Sep. 14).

I don't see a problem here. We can just override lintians warning and/or
provide a symlink (and maybe warn in the docs that the symlink will be
removed at some point). Or keep odoo.py forever even without symlink.

> We would like to do a RFS for this package. What do you think?

I would love to sponsor the package or co-maintain with you. But the
two issues above must be addressed first. Otherwise the package will
not be accepted by FTP masters.

Other ideas:

1. In my local git repo I replaced the sysvinit file with a systemd
    one. We can, of course, provide both.

2. How do you think about using dbconfig-common in the future?
    I never used it, but it sounds useful.

Cheers and thanks again!