[Mageia-webteam] Initial hosting requirements for maintainers db

[Romain d'Alverny]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 11:52, Michael Scherer <misc at zarb.org> wrote:
> Le mercredi 12 janvier 2011 à 11:22 +0100, Romain d'Alverny a écrit :
>> Misc, if in the end, hosting a rails stack does make things less
>> consistent than with other stacks, we may as well set up a host on a
>> Gandi server and dedicate it (package management and security
>> mgmt-wise to the rails stack).
>
> How would that making it more consistent ?
> Moreover, dedicating a vm just mean one more server to handle, that's
> hardly can be counted as "less work".

I never said that. At best, it would just mean, more "isolated"/delegable.

> Non integrated because that use a totally different system ( ie gem/rvm
> vs rpm/urpmi ) with totally different versions ( ie, defined by coders
> instead of the one agreed when we decided to use the distribution ),
> totally different update mechanism, and with different requirements.

Perfectly aware of that. Or we could as well host it somewhere else,
just to host the application on a matching stack. I'm not saying it's
the best solution, but it may be a temporary option to keep open.

> Another option that I consider would be to use another stack. Nanar
> already told me that he would be able to do it quite fast in catalyst,
> and I consider myself being able to do it in django without much problem
> if I dedicate enough time ( I am quite rusty but for a simple CRUD
> application, it would be quite ok ).

Obviously we still have to learn to let it go at some times, delegate,
welcome newcomers and new ideas, new stacks, if we want ever to grow
the whole thing. It has a cost (flexibility and work), sure, but it
has a payback too.

Look here: http://mageia.org/wiki/doku.php?id=web#list_of_registered_people

There's a huge pool of skills in PHP, Ruby and Django, comparatively
to Perl (that is quoted only once).

It's not by sticking to a single stack mostly only handled by
sysadmins (Catalyst in this case) that we will achieve that delegation
and growth. I'm not saying it's crap, I'm saying it does not fit the
pool of volunteers we have for contributions in web development.

That's precisely why I suggested that other stacks may be considered
(Rails, Django, Symfony) for maintainers db. Because it first more our
volunteers.

> And well, the equivalent with dreamhost would be you to ask them to keep
> a custom or old version of rails just for you. I am not sure they would
> say "yes".

Sure. But they may have to keep up with updates at some pace because
there is competition on this ground with other hosting services. And
that forces developers, sometimes, to migrate their apps to higher
revisions.

But it's not the same context as here. Still, and this is why I asked
Kosmas to see with packagers, it would help somehow to find a
solution, if sustainable, to get packages a little bit more up to
date. In this regard, it helps maintainers to have feedback from
developers I guess.


Romain