The "It's Just a Desktop Distro" Problem

[jorge o. castro]

Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> Which options do you think would make sense to expose in a server
> installation?
> 

Jack covered some ideas I was thinking about in his reply, it'd be nice 
to have things like ldap authentication right off the bat. Or would 
things like this be something that might be covered under something like 
tasksel?

> It is far too close to feature freeze to even consider anything like this
> for Hoary, of course, but if you could document some specific proposals in
> the wiki, they can be considered for the following release.  Perhaps
> the functionality in update-{notifier,manager} could be extended in some
> server-friendly ways (currently they're both desktop-oriented, but share the
> same high-level goals).

Ok, I'll grok the wiki and think of some more concrete/realistic ideas 
on this. For example, Red Carpet has a cool "connect to remote server" 
functionality that let's you manage packages from one place.

> We've talked some about this, but I'm very hesitant to try to actively
> encourage people to do this; it ends up sounding hollow.  A genuine
> testimonial is worth much more than one which requires prodding.
> What do you think we can do to encourage this, without being disingenuous
> about it?

Agreed about the prodding. I think there's already been some success 
here from the desktop-side, but as I think about it more then it's 
probably just something that will eventually come around as the things 
you talked about get more mature and Ubuntu gains more server brainshare.

> 
> If you or someone from the doc team could write up these points in the wiki,
> I think it would make a great starting point for the server team.
> 

I will do so tommorrow when I redo a few machines and am in a better 
frame of mind for this, bounce ideas off some colleagues, etc.

Thanks for pointing out the work being done in this area.

-jorge